Emotional tones in scientific writing: comparison of commercially funded studies and non-commercially funded orthopedic studies

Abstract

Background and purpose — There is ongoing debate as to whether commercial funding influences reporting of medical studies. We asked: Is there a difference in reported tones between abstracts, introductions, and discussions of orthopedic journal studies that were commercially funded and those that were not commercially funded? Methods — We conducted a systematic PubMed search to identify commercially funded studies published in 20 orthopedic journals between January 1, 2000 and December 1, 2019. We identified commercial funding of studies by including in our search the names of 10 medical device companies with the largest revenue in 2019. Commercial funding was designated when either the study or 1 or more of the authors received funding from a medical device company directly related to the content of the study. We matched 138 commercially funded articles 1 to 1 with 138 non-commercially funded articles with the same study design, published in the same journal, within a time range of 5 years. The IBM Watson Tone Analyzer was used to determine emotional tones (anger, fear, joy, and sadness) and language style (analytical, confident, and tentative). Results — For abstract and introduction sections, we found no differences in reported tones between commercially funded and non-commercially funded studies. Fear tones (non-commercially funded studies 5.1%, commercially funded studies 0.7%, p = 0.04), and analytical tones (non-commercially funded studies 95%, commercially funded studies 88%, p = 0.03) were more common in discussions of studies that were not commercially funded. Interpretation — Commercially funded studies have comparable tones to non-commercially funded studies in the abstract and introduction. In contrast, the discussion of non-commercially funded studies demonstrated more fear and analytical tones, suggesting them to be more tentative, accepting of uncertainty, and dispassionate. As text analysis tools become more sophisticated and mainstream, it might help to discern commercial bias in scientific reports.

Linguistic and semantic characteristics of articles and peer review reports in Social Sciences and Medical and Health Sciences: analysis of articles published in Open Research Central

“…Higher Authenticity score for social sciences articles, which indicates a more personal way of writing, is not an unexpected finding as analyses in social sciences and humanities often relay on interpretations based on researcher's personal opinions and values, leading to subjectivity (Khatwani & Panhwar, 2019). Higher Analytic score for articles in Medical and Health Sciences, which reflects the use of formal, logical, and hierarchical language, does not surprise due to the hypothetico-didactic methodological approach and "dispassionate scientific language" that is frequently used in these disciplines (Steffens, 2021). This is partially in accordance with previous studies that compared peer review reports in social sciences and medical and health sciences.…”

Emotional Keyboard: To Provide Adaptive Functionalities Based on the Current User Emotion and the Context

“…Significant researches have been performed on conversational devices that evaluated verbal communication (voice) when interacting with different types of users [21-23, 44, 45]. These focused on audiences who had speaking disabilities to produce Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) [45] and to assist elderly people [44], [23] (or old people with low technical knowledge [21]). However, since the target audience of this research is youngsters (who are in between 18 -24 years) and to restrict the scope, the focus here is on applications that do not use voice as input but use other techniques such as recognizing emotions using facial expressions and text analytics.…”

“…A freely available version of IBM Watson Tone Analyzer API [30] (which is used by both commercially and non-commercially funded research [44]) was used to detect emotions from the text where seven emotions such as "joy", "fear", "sadness", "anger", "analytical", "confident", and "tentative" have been identified. A notification stating the maximum emotion was sent to the user after each tracking interval of 60 seconds.…”

“…Recognising emotions using voice (verbal) was completely opted out to restrict the scope of this research. Hence, future research can be performed to evaluate such methods with a wide target audience that can include the elderly population [44], [23].…”

Exploring the Usefulness of Project-Based Learning in Enhancing Students’ Scientific Writing Skills

“…Scientific writing is a form of academic writing that describes a predetermined topic and must adhere to the scientific writing systematics. In the academic world, scientific writing is often used as one of the tasks students must do (Steffens et al, 2021;Sebola, 2022). To know students ability in scientific writing appropriate assessment should be carried out (I.…”