From Hype to High-Quality Research

Abstract

Millar and colleagues 1 describe an analysis of the use of promotional language ("hype") in abstracts of National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research projects. They extracted more than 900 000 abstracts from the NIH RePORTER (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools: Expenditures and Results) archive and measured the frequency of certain terms from 1985 to 2020. They found that the use of most promotional adjectives-such as novel, critical, and innovative-gradually and continuously increased, while the use of others-such as scalable and transformative-was essentially nonexistent in 1985 but later became much more common beginning in the late 2000s. The authors