Key Points
Question
Has the use of “hype” (promotional language) in the abstracts of successful National Institutes of Health applications increased since 1985?
Findings
This cross-sectional study of 901 717 National Institutes of Health abstracts from 1985 to 2020 shows that applicants described their work in increasingly subjective terms and relied on promotional language and appeals to emotion (ie, 130 adjective forms identified as hype increased in frequency).
Meaning
This study suggests that applicants, reviewers, and funding agencies should be aware of the increasing prevalence of promotional language in funding applications.
This cross-sectional study examines changes from 1992 to 2020 in the use of promotional language in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding opportunity announcements in comparison with trends reported in NIH grant applications.
We report on changes in the expression of epistemic stance in competitive funding applications—that is, applicants’ confidence and certainty towards knowledge and beliefs. We analysed abstracts describing all projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health during the period 1985–2020 for 140 stance features. Trends that we identify indicate that applicants adopt a stance less cautious and less tentative, and increasingly confident, optimistic, and promissory. This is evidenced, for example, by a consistent decline in weak possibility/probability, as expressed by modal verbs (e.g. may, might, should), by epistemic status verbs (indicate, seem) and adverbs (e.g. possible, probable, perhaps); and an increase among features that convey certainty, importance, and empiricism—for example, status verbs (e.g. demonstrate, establish, reveal), and adverbs that emphasize frequency/degree (usually, widely, almost). We argue that (i) these shifts are best understood in relation to increasing salesmanship and structural and cultural shifts within the research ecosystem, and (ii) trends in this dataset are better analysed at the level of individual features, rather than at the level of metadiscoursal categories.
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