Editorial pubs.acs.org/acscatalysis
Superlative Scientific Writing authors predicted that the word “novel” should be found in every scientific paper’s abstract by the year 2123. Such dramatic changes in word frequency seem to confirm the emergence of a research culture that encourages hyperbolic claims.7 The increasingly competitive nature of academic research, combined with the audit culture of its institutions and major funding agencies, has resulted in a heavy reliance on impact factors, citation statistics, and rankings that each generation of researchers must try to outperform. As Biagioli observed, any metric chosen to evaluate science rapidly ceases to function effectively in that role because practitioners start to game it.8 This inadvertent creation of incentives is familiar to economists, who know it as Goodhart’s Law. In recent years, we have noticed a distinct shift in the writing style of articles submitted to ACS Catalysis, which often describe the performance of new catalysts as excellent or unprecedented. Claims of having created a “better catalyst”, presumably in order to market the paper more persuasively to editors and reviewers, are now so pervasive that some authors report it multiple times each year for the same type of material or catalytic reaction. How ever popular this practice may be with funding agencies and academic evaluation committees, the unseemly self-promotion is diminishing our ability to build catalysis science on a solid intellectual foundation, and it will eventually erode the credibility of our field. Interestingly, the blame for both distortion and hype in science has long been unfairly aimed at journalists writing for audiences of nonexperts, rather than at scientists themselves.9 This view has been debunked by several recent studies, including a recent analysis of press releases issued by U.K. universities in 2011. Statements were found to be exaggerated in 33−40% of the institution’s announcements, compared to the corresponding peer-reviewed journal articles on which they were based.10 The inflated claims were then reflected reasonably accurately in news stories written about the research based on these announcements. Since some of the press releases would have been for scientific articles whose claims were themselves hyped in order to appeal to journal reviewers, the statistics undoubtedly underestimate the overall frequency of exaggeration, which appears to be caused largely by the researchers and their academic press agents. It is even more disturbing to realize that the use of unscientific superlatives may be autocatalytic. Although the English language now dominates scientific publishing, the fraction of authors from non-English-speaking countries has risen dramatically in recent years. The PubMed abstract study described above showed that authors from institutions in nonEnglish-speaking countries used positive words to describe their research more often than authors writing in English-speaking countries.7 These authors may model their writing on recently published English language abstracts, reinforcing the impression that such practices are widely accepted. Such authors may also be under even greater pressure to demonstrate the impact of
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ublication in peer-reviewed journals serves to disseminate scientific findings, while certifying them (via peer-review) and archiving them for future use.1 It also documents authors’ claims for the precedence of their ideas and provides crucial recognition that advances their careers. In 2014, there were over 34 000 peer-reviewed academic journals.1 Nevertheless, the demand for space, particularly in the leading journals of each field, has become intense: the number of individual authors vying for this space worldwide is increasing at a rate of about 3% per year. The total number of published research articles (as recorded by Scopus) is growing even faster: over 6% per year, based on the increase from 1.3 million to 2.4 million in the decade from 2003 to 2013.2 To manage the deluge, many selective journals, including ACS Catalysis, have adopted an editorial triage process to identify papers that are likely to fare well in their peer-review process. Referees are then asked to assess the novelty or potential impact, in addition to the scientific soundness, of the work that is selected for review. In this hypercompetitive environment, how are authors to increase their chances of having their papers reviewed and eventually published? The explicit goals of scientific writing have always been, and should be, clarity and conciseness,3 while still providing enough descriptive information to ensure that others can reproduce the work.4 Journal articles are restricted to a set of immutable headings (Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), leaving little latitude for creative structures, personal anecdotes, or humorous asides. These constraints can result in uninspiring academic prose that is dense, arcane, and turgid, even when the findings themselves are quite interesting. On the other hand, authors may intentionally try to disguise routine work by linking it to current hot topics, or by using esoteric words to make the results appear more important than they likely are.5 Another disturbing trend is making its way into the archival scientific literature: exaggerating the significance of one’s results through use of adjectives such as excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. These words are acceptable in nonscientific writing but have little or no quantifiable meaning in research. For example, all research is novel (or else it would not qualify to be called research), yet use of the word “novel” has increased 25-fold in the abstracts of medical papers since 1975,6 so that it appeared in 8.5% of such papers in 2014. The phenomenon is not limited to the health fields; it is now rampant in all areas of science and engineering. A recent study of the evolution of word frequency in PubMed abstracts revealed that the top 25 positive words were used 880% more frequently in 2014 relative to 1974; whereas negative word frequency increased much more modestly (257%), and neutral words were unchanged.7 In high-impact journals, many of which already ban words like “first” and “novel” from their titles, the increased frequency of positive words was lower, but still a distressing 674%. The absolute frequency of the four most overused words (robust, novel, innovative, unprecedented) rose by 15 000% over the four-decade period. In a humorous extrapolation, the © XXXX American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.7b00566 ACS Catal. 2017, 7, 2218−2219
ACS Catalysis
Editorial
(4) Bligaard, T.; Bullock, R. M.; Campbell, C. T.; Chen, J. G.; Gates, B. C.; Gorte, R. J.; Jones, C. W.; Jones, W. D.; Kitchin, J. R.; Scott, S. L. ACS Catal. 2016, 6, 2590−2602. (5) Pinker, S. Chronicle of Higher Education: Chronicle Review, September 2014. (6) Goodman, N. W. Eur. Sci. Ed. 2015, 41, 31−35. (7) Vinkers, C. H.; Tijdink, J. K.; Otte, W. M. BMJ. [Br. Med. J.] 2015, 351, h6467. (8) Biagioli, M. Nature 2016, 535, 201. (9) Bubela, T.; Nisbet, M. C.; Borchelt, R.; Brunger, F.; Critchley, C.; Einsiedel, E.; Geller, G.; Gupta, A.; Hampel, J.; Hyde-Lay, R.; Jandciu, E. W.; Jones, S. A.; Kolopack, P.; Lane, S.; Lougheed, T.; Nerlich, B.; Ogbogu, U.; O’Riordan, K.; Ouellette, C.; Spear, M.; Strauss, S.; Thavaratnam, T.; Willemse, L.; Caulfield, T. Nat. Biotechnol. 2009, 27, 514−518. (10) Sumner, P.; Vivian-Griffiths, S.; Boivin, J.; Williams, A.; Venetis, C. A.; Davies, A.; Ogden, J.; Whelan, L.; Hughes, B.; Dalton, B.; Boy, F.; Chambers, C. D. BMJ. [Br. Med. J.] 2014, 349, g7015. (11) Caulfield, T.; Sipp, D.; Murry, C. E.; Daley, G. Q.; Kimmelman, J. Science 2016, 352, 776−777. (12) Gopen, G.; Swan, J. Am. Sci. 1990, 78, 550−558. (13) Describing specific achievements “for the first time” is acceptable in the author’s cover letter, to highlight the potential importance of the work. This is an effective way to communicate novelty and impact to the editor. However, as stated in this editorial, “first time” claims in the manuscript should be minimized, or used with appropriately cautious modifiers such as “to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time....”.
their work to the research institutions and funding agencies in their countries. While enthusiasm and optimistic extrapolation are natural, it is time to acknowledge that the misrepresentation of research findings through exaggeration or hype is a grave matter for scientific integrity. Misleading statements, irresponsible claims, and credulity create unrealistic expectations, waste valuable research funds, and impede scientific progress.11 External pressures to simplify, to entertain, and to market cannot be allowed to override our primary goal of describing physical and chemical complexity accurately.12 In catalysis, as in many science fields, comparative adjectives are almost always more appropriate than superlatives: authors should describe precisely how their catalysts behave relative to established benchmarks under carefully controlled conditions4 and let readers draw their own conclusions about how remarkable the results are. The high quality of the work and the insight it generates, expressed clearly without excessive spin or hype, is what should impress editors, reviewers, and fellow researchers. At ACS Catalysis, we prescreen all manuscript submissions for a list of keywords, including new/novel, whose use is not allowed in titles and abstracts, as well as for descriptive words such as outstanding, excellent, unprecedented, exceptional, sustainable, green, and related adjectives. These words are flagged by the journal, so that the editor handling the manuscript can evaluate the appropriateness of their use in the paper on the basis of his/her interpretation of the results, as well as the comments of the referees. The editor may then require removal or revision of some or all of these words prior to publication. Papers that contain a large number of inappropriate words are often triaged by the editor prior to external peer review, if the findings are perceived to be oversold. Finally, we note that claims of “for the first time” should be made very cautiously in submitted manuscripts, because authors have no way of knowing what other work will precede their publication. When they appear in the abstract, these claims are also flagged by the journal for review by the handling editor. In general, such claims are strongly discouraged.13
Susannah L. Scott*
University of California, Santa Barbara
Christopher W. Jones
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Georgia Institute of Technology
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Susannah L. Scott: 0000-0003-1161-0499 Christopher W. Jones: 0000-0003-3255-5791 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Ware, M.; Mabe, M. The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Journal Publishing; 4th ed.; International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers: The Hague, The Netherlands, 2015. (2) Plume, A.; van Weijen, D. Res. Trends Issue 38, September 2014. (3) Coghill, A. M.; Garson, L. R. The ACS Style Guide: Effective Communication of Scientific Information; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2006. 2219
DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.7b00566 ACS Catal. 2017, 7, 2218−2219
