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.

Comments

This one weird trick will get your paper published

[Overzeetop]

The expansion of clickbait headlines into everything makes me weep for humanity.

No kidding.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:No kidding.

[Moof123]

I've tried to read a lot of papers in my field, which is Mixed Signal ASIC design, and mostly they are awful. The reasons break down as follows.

1) Corporate papers are enough to advertise what they did, but leave out most of the important details if you are trying to follow in their foot steps. Understandable, but counter to the whole point of the paper and conference circuit.

2) Academic papers are awash in the need for every PhD candidate, and most Master's candidates to get published. The conference committees are from this arena and are overly sympathetic. So you get a ton of student papers that are badly written and mostly redundant. Until we ease off "novelty" and invention as a criteria in engineering, which is mostly turning existing cranks and only occasionally novel, the few good papers will be lost in a see of bad student papers.

3) Every paper must use a jargon Thesaurus to replace all normal english words with the most obscure ivory tower versions. It makes papers impenetrable even when you find one that is on-point otherwise. I've run across a couple 1st drafts on author websites that ended up being twice as informative as the as-published version for this reason. I believe the editors (a bunch of self aggrandizing academics) actively reject readable papers.

It's clear what's happening

[hackertourist]

They're trying to increase their Bullshit Bingo scores...