Keeping the pronouncements and declarations of scientists in real-world perspective has been one of the aims of this blog. But in these columns A problem of science was preceded by Dali and the beauty of science. So the need to keep the scientific endeavour on track has been posed as a challenge but science has not been mocked.
The danger of pride within the scientific community is one element that gives rise to concern; another is the scourge of a highly competitive atmosphere enveloping practitioners, whether in academia or industry. Therefore is is worth noting a piece run in The Times in December 2015. It was picked up and carried in The Australian of December 18, 2015, under the headline The science of hyperbole is now exponential. In full, that piece states:
The danger of pride within the scientific community is one element that gives rise to concern; another is the scourge of a highly competitive atmosphere enveloping practitioners, whether in academia or industry. Therefore is is worth noting a piece run in The Times in December 2015. It was picked up and carried in The Australian of December 18, 2015, under the headline The science of hyperbole is now exponential. In full, that piece states:
Some researchers might call it the most outrageous affront to their profession since the trial of Galileo. That is where the problem lies.The world of science appears to have a growing addiction to hyperbole, according to an analysis of article summaries published over the past four decades. Scientists at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands found the proportion of abstracts using 25 adjectives such as "groundbreaking", "amazing" and "spectacular" has risen almost eight-fold since the mid-1970s.
Today's abstracts are nearly 40 times as likely to mention the word "novel" as they were in 1974. "By extrapolating...over the past 40 years to the future, we predict the word `novel` will appear in every record by the year 2123," the academics say in the British Medical Journal. It is not clear whether this surge is more of a result of competition for funding or of a ratcheting-up of hype scientists need to go through to get their papers in journals.
While books published today are marginally more likely to use one of the 25 positive adjectives than they were 40 years ago, the rise of verbal embroidery in scientific papers has been, well, staggeringly exponential. "Scientists may assume that results and their implications have to be exaggerated and overstated to get published," the authors write.
