{"id":95344,"date":"2023-08-22T06:38:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-22T11:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=95344"},"modified":"2025-07-25T11:30:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T16:30:24","slug":"95344","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=95344","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.<\/em>
\n— Richard Horton,<\/a> editor of The Lancet<\/em><\/p>\n

A study of language in\u00a0Science<\/em>\u00a0articles from 1997 through 2021 raises concerns about exaggerated claims.<\/a><\/p>\n

Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal,\u00a0the frequency of hedging words such as \u201cmight” and “probably” has fallen by about 40% over the past 2 decades, a study finds<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence \u201care vital to communicating what one\u2019s data can actually say and what it merely implies,\u201d says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. \u201cIf academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric \u2026 it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new analysis, one of the largest of its kind, examined more than 2600 research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in\u00a0Science<\/cite>, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. (Science<\/cite>\u2019s news team is independent from the editorial side.) The team searched the papers for about 50 terms such as \u201ccould,\u201d \u201cappear to,\u201d \u201capproximately,\u201d and \u201cseem.\u201d The frequency of these hedging words dropped from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021.<\/p>\n

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The study adds to other findings suggesting \u201can increasing reluctance to undersell one’s research in a competitive academic world,\u201d says Ken Hyland, a linguist at the University of East Anglia who was not involved in the study. Analyses of other scientific journals<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0a 2022 paper<\/a>\u00a0that examined nearly the same group of papers from\u00a0Science<\/cite>\u00a0have found growing use of a positive, promotional tone\u2014expressed in superlatives such as \u201cgroundbreaking\u201d and \u201cunprecedented\u201d\u2014which may lead to exaggerated claims.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Less hedging may reflect a subtle strategy by authors to sell their results to editors and readers as an alternative to explicit exaggeration, according to the study, published in the August issue of\u00a0Scientometrics<\/cite>. That should concern scientists, says co-author Ying Wei, a linguist at Nanjing University, because \u201cessentially, the nature of academic knowledge is indeterminate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science<\/cite>\u2019s expectations that manuscripts provide reliable evidence didn\u2019t drop during the study period, says Executive Editor Valda Vinson, who joined the journal in 1999. She suggests authors may be hedging less because editors have increasingly asked authors to supply additional supporting information. The\u00a0Scientometrics<\/cite> findings may also reflect a move by the editors away from older conventions of scientific writing that encouraged hedging and passive voice, she says. That style has given way to a more modern, informal tone marked by less hedging. To avoid exaggeration, \u201cwe tone down language if it comes across as definitive when [the evidence] is not,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

Vinson also notes that the\u00a0Scientometrics<\/cite>\u00a0study looked only at papers published in the Research Article format, which used to be reserved for a few landmark papers that may have been especially likely to hedge. During the study period,\u00a0Science<\/cite>\u00a0increasingly shifted more findings to the Research Articles format.<\/p>\n

A more informal writing style in research papers may have an upside if it makes them more understandable to policymakers and the public, Wheeler says. She and colleagues came to that conclusion in a 2021\u00a0Scientometrics<\/cite>\u00a0study that analyzed the abstracts of nearly 800,000 articles published in psychology journals between 1970 and 2016. But the study also\u00a0red flags a 24% increase during that period in an index for \u201cclout.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0This linguistic measure reflects language similar to \u201cin my expert opinion,\u201d that is confident and authoritative\u2014perhaps in some cases too confident.<\/p>\n

Although journal editors and reviewers should look out for exaggerated claims, they shouldn\u2019t bear all the responsibility, Wheeler cautions. \u201cIt\u2019s also up to universities and research institutes to value the quality over quantity of researchers\u2019 outputs,\u201d she says, \u201cwhich would allow more time for academics to reflect and produce meaningful work instead of churning out as many publishable papers as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wei adds a hedge of her own, however: The new study doesn\u2019t show what caused the observed decline of hedging language. The pressure to publish that academics face to gain tenure, promotion, and professional recognition may play a role, but there could be other factors as well. The nature of the connection, she says, deserves further study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. — Richard Horton, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fraud","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95345,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95344\/revisions\/95345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}