The extent to which researchers follow the recommendation write introduction sections as short and informative as possible is unknown. Although it is evident that many authors do not follow this recommendation, the extent to which researchers follow it is unknown. Here, we investigated the degree of relative prolixity among 101 journals with different CiteScore™ classified in the ‘Pharmaceutical Science’ category. We recorded the number of characters (including spaces), paragraphs and citations in their introduction sections. Based on these data, relative prolixity was calculated as the ratio between the number of characters and the number of citations contained in the introductory section of original articles.