Over‐promotion and caution in abstracts of preprints during the COVID‐19 crisis

Abstract

The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader's attention. The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers. Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre‐pandemic period. We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective ) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may ). Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results. The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID‐19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over‐promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.

Is academic writing becoming more positive? A large-scale diachronic case study of Science research articles across 25 years

“…Cao et al ( 2020 ) also find an increasingly positive trend in terms of linguistic positivity based on the examination of how the frequencies of positive and negative words change over time in both abstracts and full texts in journals from PubMed. Second, the latest studies resort to larger dictionaries and lexicons to tackle the limitation of the small list of positive and negative words (Vinkers et al, 2015 ), including studies by Holtz et al ( 2017 ), Bordignon et al ( 2021 ), and Wen and Lei ( 2021 ). In these studies, researchers adopt self-created dictionaries (Holtz et al, 2017 ), expanded list of positive/negative words (Bordignon et al, 2021 ), or sentiment analysis with large lexicons in R (Wen & Lei, 2021 ) to triangulate the results based on Vinkers et al’s ( 2015 ) small list of positive and negative words.…”

“…Second, the latest studies resort to larger dictionaries and lexicons to tackle the limitation of the small list of positive and negative words (Vinkers et al, 2015 ), including studies by Holtz et al ( 2017 ), Bordignon et al ( 2021 ), and Wen and Lei ( 2021 ). In these studies, researchers adopt self-created dictionaries (Holtz et al, 2017 ), expanded list of positive/negative words (Bordignon et al, 2021 ), or sentiment analysis with large lexicons in R (Wen & Lei, 2021 ) to triangulate the results based on Vinkers et al’s ( 2015 ) small list of positive and negative words. Third, regarding the limitation of findings generalised from one discipline, Bordignon et al ( 2021 ) compare abstracts across disciplines between a pre-pandemic corpus and a corpus of preprints issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and discover an increase of positive words and a slight decrease of negative words.…”

“…In these studies, researchers adopt self-created dictionaries (Holtz et al, 2017 ), expanded list of positive/negative words (Bordignon et al, 2021 ), or sentiment analysis with large lexicons in R (Wen & Lei, 2021 ) to triangulate the results based on Vinkers et al’s ( 2015 ) small list of positive and negative words. Third, regarding the limitation of findings generalised from one discipline, Bordignon et al ( 2021 ) compare abstracts across disciplines between a pre-pandemic corpus and a corpus of preprints issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and discover an increase of positive words and a slight decrease of negative words. The results are encouraging because in these studies, a growing trend of positive language is observed based on mixed methods, thus further confirming the linguistic positivity bias in academic writing.…”

“…While existing studies provide significant insights into linguistic positivity bias in academic writing, the findings are still limited in the following three aspects. First, all of the exiting studies, except for Bordignon et al ( 2021 ), investigated linguistic positivity bias in academic writing in individual disciplines. Little study has researched linguistic positivity bias in academic writing across disciplines.…”

Using an expert survey and user feedback to construct PRECHECK: A checklist to evaluate preprints on COVID-19 and beyond

“…Others may intentionally use preprints to release replications, and null results that are difficult to publish (27), or works in progress which may be less well-written and inadequate at sharing data/code (17)(18)(19)(20). Many preprints actually report their results in a balanced way so as not to 'oversell' their findings (31). Preprints on clinical trials for example were shown to report results that may be just as credible as those of publications (32).…”