Scientists have become more upbeat in describing their research, an analysis of papers in the PubMed database suggests.

Researchers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands say that the frequency of positive-sounding words such as ‘novel’, ‘amazing’, ‘innovative’ and ‘unprecedented’ has increased almost nine-fold in the titles and abstracts of papers published between 1974 and 2014. There has also been a smaller — yet still statistically significant — rise in the frequency of negative words, such as ‘disappointing’ and ‘pessimistic’.

Source: Ref. 1

Psychiatrist Christiaan Vinkers and his colleagues searched papers on PubMed for 25 'positive' words and 25 'negative' words (which the authors selected by manually analysing papers and consulting thesaurus listings). The number of papers containing any of the positive words in their title or abstract rose from an average of 2% in 1974–80 to 17.5% in 2014. Use of the 25 negative words rose from 1.3% to 2.4% over the same period, according to the study, published in the British Medical Journal on 14 December¹.

The change seems to be a trend particular to research papers, the authors say: an analysis of the same words in published books (using the Google Books Ngram viewer) showed little change. Nor did the researchers see significant changes in how often research papers used a list of ‘neutral’ words, and another list of 100 randomly chosen common nouns and adjectives.

Rising hype

The most obvious interpretation of the results is that they reflect an increase in hype and exaggeration, rather than a real improvement in the incidence or quality of discoveries, says Vinkers. The findings “fit our own observations that in order to get published, you need to emphasize what is special and unique about your study," he says. Researchers may be tempted to make their findings stand out from thousands of others — a tendency that might also explain the more modest rise in usage of negative words.

Text mining uncovers British reserve and US emotion

The word ‘novel’ now appears in more than 7% of PubMed paper titles and abstracts, and the researchers jokingly extrapolate that, on the basis of its past rise, it is set to appear in every paper by the year 2123.  

Vinkers’ team also broke down the figures according to journal impact factors and the geographical affiliations of the authors. They found that the increase in positive words was smaller in recent years for 20 high-impact journals, compared to the average for all journals. It was also smaller over the past decade or so for authors affiliated in English-speaking countries, relative to authors outside these countries.

Changing vernacular

Computer scientist Peter Sheridan Dodds at the University of Vermont in Burlington, a specialist in text analysis, cautions that the findings are preliminary, because the work is based on just a few handpicked words. “The overall trend may well hold up with a full analysis, but we have to look at how the whole word ecology is changing,” he says. It may be that equally positive words were once common in the literature but have fallen out of favour.

Text-mining offers clues to success

But Vinkers and his colleagues think that the trend highlights a problem. “If everything is ‘robust’ and ‘novel’”, says Vinkers, then there is no distinction between the qualities of findings. “In that case, words used to describe scientific results are no longer driven by the content but by marketability.”

Whether the same trends exist in other disciplines isn’t yet clear, but Vinkers thinks that the PubMed corpus might be especially prone to these effects. “We expect that the publication pressure which may underlie these results is particularly present in biomedical, social and psychological sciences”, he says.

Journal name:

Nature

DOI:

doi:10.1038/nature.2015.19024

• Tweet Follow @NatureNews

For the best commenting experience, please login or register as a user and agree to our Community Guidelines. You will be re-directed back to this page where you will see comments updating in real-time and have the ability to recommend comments to other users.

3 comments Subscribe to comments

1. 
   Chris Aldrich • 2015-12-15 07:46 PM

   I can readily posit a potential and very strong motivation for the uptick in the appearance of these words, and particularly for the word "novel", which the paper and this article fail to see. Beginning in the early 90's, and certainly starting before that time, there has been an intensified interest for both research institutions and researchers writing papers for them to monetize their research outside the halls of the academy. (Particularly with decreased funding for faculty and intensified competition for research dollars - many research faculty either self-fund their salaries or rely heavily on 3rd party income.) Toward this end, individual researchers began more aggressively pursuing patents for their research work and at the institutional level, colleges and universities began very actively pursuing technology transfer to the point of opening up full offices and hiring large numbers of staff to better leverage the return of creating patents and pursuing sales and licensing deals for the resulting research work. The US Patent Office, in making a determination of whether or not to grant patents, (and even moreso when the underlying documents are published scientific research articles) uses words like "novel" and "innovative" as an indicator of their worthiness. Without a patent, it's incredibly difficult to protect the intellectual property contained within a published and public work. Other words like "amazing" which are also cited in the paper are geared (in a business sales sense) more toward potential corporate financial investors who may consider purchasing or licensing the resulting work of a research paper. What corporate bean counter wants to invest in a dull-sounding research paper title which is quite likely one of the only parts of the document they're likely to comprehend? Yet throw in some "excitement words" and you may have a sale! When one looks at employment contracts of the professoriate (post-docs, graduate students, and the like), which presumably comprises the majority of those publishing papers with these words, one will see that professors prior to the 90's have contracts that don't mention intellectual property rights resulting from their efforts, or which grant them the lion's share. Current contracts after that period will almost necessarily keep either all or most of these types of revenue streams in the institution's pockets rather than the researchers themselves. I'd be willing to bet that this tide began turning in the mid-1970s and has certainly been overwhelming since the mid-90s. It is these severe economic taskmasters which are almost assuredly the cause of the rise of these buzzwords in research papers, and most particularly in their titles. One need only ask themselves, which university wants to be the next proverbial "Stanford" to not have a piece of revenue from the intellectual property of a proverbial "Page rank" algorithm? Or in biomedical research, to not take a hefty cut out of a drug which could potentially cure cancer or HIV/AIDS? Take a gander at what something as simple as a HELA cell, which was taken and cultured without any notice to Henrietta Lacks, has become from an industrial perspective. If they can avoid it, academia certainly won't let multi-million (or billion) dollar enterprises spring up (again) without them receiving a piece of the pie.

   • Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share link to this comment
2. 
   Bart Penders • 2015-12-15 12:32 PM

   Already in 1975, Randall Collins described science as “an open plain with men scattered throughout it, shouting: ‘Listen to me! Listen to me! . . . The fundamental process is a competition for attention” (Collins 1975, 480). The competition for attention does not have to take place in/through publications, it used to be a face-to-face, or small-group thing. With the growing amount of scientists, growing sizes of teams in science and growing competition for funding and career options, this competition is growing ever more fierce. The competition is not new, the way the fight is fought changes from time to time though. The labels, 'true', 'new', 'novel', 'amazing' or any other does not obfuscate science. Scientific finding will always compete with one another for credibility, because credibility does not flow automatically from a statement, it has to be made and maintained. Calling something 'novel' is a way to do it. Calling something 'well-established' or 'common knowledge' is merely another...

   • Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share link to this comment
3. 
   Bernard Carroll • 2015-12-15 07:32 AM

   We used to try to do something called dispassionate science. Now it looks like hand waving is a required course for graduate students and postdocs. They, in turn, are just following their faculty role models.

   • Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share link to this comment