Abstract
The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader's attention. The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers. Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre‐pandemic period. We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may). Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results. The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID‐19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over‐promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted intensive research through which researchers and clinicians are actively trying to understand the biology of the virus, the dynamics of its transmission, the development of symptoms, diagnostic tests, drugs, vaccines or the economic and social consequences of the pandemic
We explore whether the authors are increasingly resorting to positive words and persuasive linguistic devices during the COVID-19 crisis, in order to be visible or noticeable in the midst of this unprecedented volume of preprints
The abstract is considered to be a promotional genre, with many optimistic phrases intended to convince the reader of the importance of the work presented by the authors (e.g.: "it could be effective...", "our findings suggest promising effects on...", "this present study could provide a novel insight into...")
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic (declared on March 11, 2020 by the WHO) has prompted intensive research through which researchers and clinicians are actively trying to understand the biology of the virus, the dynamics of its transmission, the development of symptoms, diagnostic tests, drugs, vaccines or the economic and social consequences of the pandemic. This is what triggers the overuse of positive terms (Vinkers et al, 2015), and overstatements in abstract conclusions (Boutron, 2020; Shinohara et al, 2017) Both in Berkenkotter and Huckin's (1995) study of abstracts of articles published between 1944 and 1989 and in Vinkers’ more recent study of PubMed abstracts published between 1974 and 2014, the tendency to over-promote results was seen to increase, leading the former authors to conclude that "today’s scientists seem to be promoting their work to a degree never seen before" and the latter that researchers "assume that results and their implications have to be exaggerated and overstated in order to get published". Our present study was initially inspired by that of Vinkers et al (2015) on the use of positive words; this previous work was a diachronic study, it did not focus on periods of crisis
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