| Lexical complexity indices are often used as the yardstick of the writers’ lexical competence and writing proficiency of second language (L2) students, especially for the end product of the scholars’ academic endeavor, such as a published journal article. Additionally, indexed citation counts of the published journal articles oftentimes indicate the impact and the quality of scholars’ contribution in their respective field. Thus, evaluating the lexical complexity of journal articles in the published journal articles can benchmark of the scholars’ academic success and contribution. The research employed the lexemic vocab profiler to determine the writing proficiency level and a corpus-based, quantitative method to identify the occurrences of the linguistic phenomenon, which consisted of operationalized statistical calculations using descriptive statistics and Spearman’s rho as well as Pearson’s correlation test to determine the strength and direction of the (non)-linearity between lexical complexity indices and citation counts of the journal articles. The researcher also made a custom corpus using SKETCH Engine by collecting 50 journal articles obtained from five journals indexed across SINTA 1 to SINTA 5 using the keyword “Applied Linguistics”, which then was trimmed down to only the top-ten highly-cited journal articles for further analysis. The analyses of 33 lexical complexity indices showed that the mean of lexical density index (LD), lexical sophistication indices (LS1/LS2/VS1/VS2/CVS1), number of different words indices (NDW/NDWZ/NDWERZ/NDWERZ), Type-Token Ratio indices (TTR/MSTTR/CTTR/RTTR/LogTTR/Uber) of the top-ten highly cited journal articles were fairly higher than on the introduction of the research articles (RA) (Dewi, 2017) and oral narratives respectively (Lu, 2012) except for the TTR (which was lower and sensitive to the texts’ length). On the other hand, the mean of lexical variation indices (LV/VV1/SVV1/CVV1/VV2/NV/AdjV/AdvV/ModV) were fairly lower than on the introduction of the RA (Dewi, 2017) and oral narratives (Lu, 2012) except for the VV1 and SVV1 (which were contradictorily higher and unstable across different texts). The results also indicated more prevalent use of simpler and more frequent basic lexical variables instead of the more complex lexical indices indicating more lexical simplicity in the journal articles. Lastly, the results showed mostly nonlinear, not statistically significant, or very weak negative correlations between lexical complexity indices and citation counts in the top-ten highly-cited journal articles, implying that less complex lexical variables might produce fairly higher citations counts. However, it had to be noted that the researcher found that the SINTA indexation system did not reflect a proper sequential rank in terms of selected applied linguistics journals’ impact factor and citation counts. Thus, this research suggests that lexical complexity indices had marginal impact on the number of citation counts. As for pedagogical implication, the study suggests that teaching the most frequent and common lexical items related to the content and keywords might prove to be more beneficial in advancing the lexical competence and writing proficiency of the students’ writing. |