Writing to advance knowledge: The impact of readability on knowledge diffusion in OSCM

The sophistication of academic research often creates a cognitive barrier for readers when they understand and utilize new knowledge. Cognizant of this issue, scholars in various fields, including Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM), have called for improved communication in academic research. Readability is a key pillar of written communication and is particularly important in OSCM. This is partially because OSCM articles tend to be diverse in terms of methods, theoretical lenses used, and author origins. OSCM is also a field where knowledge is created with the purpose of interfacing with real business problems closely and engaging with diverse external stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between readability and knowledge diffusion in academic OSCM research. Using cognitive load as the theoretical lens for readability, we analyze a full-text dataset of 1476 articles published in leading OSCM journals between 1998 and 2018. We find that readability has a positive impact on citations garnered. This relationship holds over 3-year short-term spans and 6-year long-term spans, indicating lasting effects. In addition, the results show that the impact of readability on knowledge diffusions is nonlinear. This finding confirms the additive nature of cognitive load and suggests that there is a level authors and journal editors should achieve to make their work more understandable and more likely to be diffused. Suggestions are made to help researchers reduce cognitive loads and to increase the likelihood that knowledge generated in their research is more likely to be disseminated by future researchers.