Observability is a very useful concept for determining whether the dynamics of complicated systems can be correctly reconstructed from a single (univariate or multivariate) time series. When the governing equations of dynamical systems are high-dimensional and/or rational, analytical computations of observability coefficients produce large polynomial functions with a number of terms that become exponentially large with the dimension and the nature of the system. In order to overcome this difficulty, we introduce here a symbolic observability coefficient based on a symbolic computation of the determinant of the observability matrix. The computation of such coefficients is straightforward and can be easily analytically carried out, as demonstrated in this paper for a five-dimensional rational system.