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Hype In Science Papers On the Rise (nature.com)
schwit1 writes: In the past forty years the use of descriptive words by scientists to positively hype their results in papers has increased steadily. "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'.
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.
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." This study was focused on the medical field, so it is unclear if its results could be extrapolated to other science fields.
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.
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." This study was focused on the medical field, so it is unclear if its results could be extrapolated to other science fields.
when they call a prosthetic limb a "robotic" limb.
Hype, hype is everywhere!!
The expansion of clickbait headlines into everything makes me weep for humanity.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Neither does "unprecedented."
They just mean something that hasn't happened before.
People demand value for money from government funding. Can't give funding to slacker scientists who slack in their ivory tower all day wearing tweed and drinking sherry and whatnot or whatever it is that academics do.
So, it's demanded that scientists perform. Which means do important stuff. And lots of it. Publish or perish! MOAR PAPERS! But are they good? That's measured by how important all other scientists think their work is. Which is measured by citations. And to get citations, you need to get people interested enough to read your paper, which now has to stand out in the massive flood of papers which is occuring because people need to be seen to be churning out work.
And that means up-selling the papers, which means hype.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"The word 'novel' now appears in more than 7% of PubMed paper titles"
Isn't this simply a reflection of how long the papers are?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I find these novel results to be stimulating and quite promising in generating increased hype with less overall negativity.
I hate the use of 'novel' and 'efficient' in scientific titles. I will be the judge of that, thank you very much.
See the link in my sig for proof.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't know, that study that they've done is certainly novel, innovative, and unprecedented. I dare say, it's amazing!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
the amount of actual new or interesting science. We're definitely on the far end of the logistic curve with regards to how much stuff we can find out.
What can compare to the periodic table of elements, radioactivity, the neutron, the size of the universe, computers, transistors?
"A revolutionary approach to getting 0.01% more out of a half century old process", by 12 cheating Chinese students?
As opposed to
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf
One guy inventing not one, but a bunch of new ideas, in a self-effacing humble way?
What do you want? People are pressured more and more to go to university (because it's a big business)... to do WHAT, exactly?
I see what you did there...
-A paper by Farnsworth.
They're trying to increase their Bullshit Bingo scores...
Scientists self promoting themselves. Gee. Whouda thunk?
Just saw this garbage in the "news" today: https://www.newscientist.com/a... epic, completely new, unique, interesting, etc. All for a shitty video of penguins splitting a squid.
Modifying a quote from Jon Stewart:
"Saying you're [innovative] is like saying you have a big ****. If you have to say it, it probably isn't true"
What you need to get corporation money in is to publish ABOUT your paper like you were courting the venture capitalists that these corporations are for research science.
If the companies don't care about the research being done by the university, no matter how useful it is scientifically, they will put there money where they hear they will make a huge profit from the results, not where they hear nothing spectacular and therefore nothing saleable.
You won't believe the results in your grant requests if you imply the certain demise of humanity due to Global Warming/Anthropogenic Climate Change!
It will shock you!
Weird that the summary doesn't include a link to the BMJ study itself, titled "Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis". Whatever you might think of their findings, at least you can't fault the authors for hyping their study. Hype, I suspect, is a symptom of the data epidemic of our times. Readers, or what's left of them, need to know fast if something's worth reading. The more "tweetable" the title, the more eyeballs a study gets, never mind if it's positive or negative. And this goes not just for academic studies but for Donald Trump as well.
If someone who had just read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions came up to you and started talking about it, what would you say to deflate his or her excitement, as a crabby older person? I was thinking, that dominating grant funding games play some role deepening the science but also gumming up the revolutions? Especially in anything related to medicine, which also gets the whammy of body neuroses and extreme profit taking. I guess the critique is that Kuhn sees science too hermetically? How does ActUp's role in advancing HIV research play into it? Example or counter-example?
Stupid hype words in article abstracts seem like the least of our problems. Sort of like how pundits discuss politics. Really angry anti-pundits like in the Washington Monthly used to compare Washington to a tea party or the court at Versailles where the important thing is adhere to conventional wisdom in a form of etiquette and use the right phrases while ignoring the larger issues. But now tea party means something else and breaking the china does not seem so worthy.
While I would agree "amazing" and "unprecedented" have no place in a scientific publication, "novel" is pretty benign. Lots of times you are describing a technique that has already been done, but your method is some new method not yet tried - novel.
Heh, I've used all of those except 'amazing' in almost every paper I've written (and the few times I missed an opportunity, someone else suggested I add them in). It really is important to note that your stuff is super-mega-new (novel/innovative/unprecedented/modern/current/concomitant to something else that is new) and that it does something radical.
Some even show this 'radical'ness by using completely irrelevant measurements for their comparisons with established mainstream algorithms/procedures. It's pretty fucking low, but they do get published, and getting published means your chances of research grants increase...
I have never used 'amazing' though. My mother taught me that describing myself or my work with 'amazing' may come off as mildly narcissistic.
And people wonder why i don't believe in fusion or warp drive or the singularity. Scientists have lost their way.
Ironically, my captcha phrase is Sagacity.
"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."
It strikes me that in the next few years at least, this is only going to accelerate. My (UK) university's internal review procedures require you to "emphasize the novelty." The abstracts of almost all of the papers in journals I actually read (respect?) contain some description of the novelty, regardless of how small the incremental advance in performance is. This seems unavoidable since your paper must be different to other peoples' work and you must spell out to the editor how this condition is met.
As for self-promotion, I think you'd have to be an idiot to not self-promote to some extent. Job security in academia looks pretty flimsy from where I sit (surrounded by PhDs and post-docs). Publish often, otherwise you can get out of academia.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to do a spin-off of this study examining "impact."
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
At least in my field, if the work is not novel, it is not publishable. It is expected by the handful of journals I publish in that the authors point out what makes the submitted work novel. In that context, the use of the word "novel" is not a positive hype word -- just an indication that the submitted work meets a minimum criterion of being a new contribution to the body of knowledge on the subject.
I came here to say exactly this!
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
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To get a patent, your invention must be novel. Journals also ask for novel results in their instructions to authors. Not suprising then that authors include it in their titles and abstacts.
This is just about everywhere. I am in a distribution list for my daughter's school district, and the common factor in the reports that they send is always the same: this has been an amazing month, the students are writing amazing essays, the lacrosse team had an amazing performance, etc. No matter what happens, it is always amazing, or astounding, or something similar.
These Headlines Are Doing WHAT?!?
And that means up-selling the papers, which means hype.
Indeed. The list of positive words tracked in TFA is:
amazing, assuring, astonishing, bright, creative, encouraging, enormous, excellent, favourable, groundbreaking, hopeful, innovative, inspiring, inventive, novel, phenomenal, prominent, promising, reassuring, remarkable, robust, spectacular, supportive, unique, unprecedented
A lot of these are clearly "hype" words (amazing, spectacular, etc.), but I'm a little less sure of others. Some clearly could be used to mean specific things regarding the experiments, the data, or descriptions of components (bright, enormous, unique), some have technical meanings that are important (phenomenal, robust), and others just don't seem really "positive" like the others in implying "hype" (assuring, reassuring, supportive -- is this judging hype or how much "self-help" is going on in these articles?).
Anyhow, I would also note that this study began by looking at papers from the 70s. I mean -- come on, you need to treat your data with care. Back then, "hype" words would be different. Why aren't they tracking the use of groovy, far out, outta sight, solid, totally hip, and funkadelic?
I don't know, that study that they've done is certainly novel, innovative, and unprecedented. I dare say, it's amazing!
Well, it certainly contains those words if you grep for them, so this study supports its own results.
It's a nine-TIMES increase. An X-fold increase is a power of 2. Since the claimed increase is from 2% to 17½%, usage occurs nearly nine times as often, or a bit over a four-fold increase. A nine-fold increase (2^9 = 512×) would require hype to exist in every single one of the more than five times as many papers as are actually published, and then in some more.
My advisor had a good way of keeping his student's writing modest and in check. First, words like the ones these researchers looked for just we're allowed. But, to really drive the point home, he'd replace every instance of "very" with "damn". It was damn interesting to read your manuscript in that context.
We need more advisors like him.
-Chris
Indeed
Like, totally amazing!
Mathematic!
Only I can judge you.
Peer reviewers hate him!!
Editorialized science papers? WTH?!? Spinning data is nothing more than fuzzy science and also exposes everyone to agendas.
Fail, fail, fail.
Haaaaaaa! Made you look!
"U13A-02: If You See Something, Say SomethingMore"
"U13A-03: Reticence, Accuracy and Efficacy"
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/14/reporting-from-agu15/
"A new proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, using this one weird trick..."
...You won't Believe What Happens Next!
I would watch a movie called "Catastrophic Under Water Disastrous War"
Novel Distances for Dollo Data
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This is literally the worst news ever.