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Promoting research by reducing uncertainty in academic writing: a large-scale diachronic case study on hedging in Science research articles across 25 years

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Abstract

Hedges are important in academic writing since they indicate uncertainty and tentativeness about academic knowledge. However, few studies explore how hedges have changed in academic writing overtime. Among the existing studies, there is also divergent understandings. The current case study traced the diachronic development of hedges that express doubt and uncertainty in the full texts of Science research articles from 1997 to 2021. Our findings show that the use of such hedges has significantly decreased in the past 25 years in the research articles of the Journal Science. In addition, we propose that the drop of such hedges in Science research articles may be an implicit writing strategy for research promotion, and therefore may correlate with the rising linguistic positivity in academic writing. Our hypothesis was initially confirmed by the significant correlation between the evolution of hedges and Yuan and Yao’s (Scientometrics 127:1–17, 2022) sentiment scores in academic writing. Our findings may reveal a bigger picture of promoting research by adopting not only explicit strategies such as more positive language (Yuan and Yao in Scientometrics 127:1–17, 2022) but also subtle and implicit writing strategies such as reducing uncertainty. Finally, we discussed the implications of this study for peer reviewers, editors, and researchers.

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Notes

  1. See https://www.science.org/content/page/mission-and-scope.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extent our greatest gratitude to the editor and the reviewers for their professional and constructive comments, especially about the conceptual connections between linguistic positivity bias, hyping, confidence, and research promotion, which would not have been made clearer without their help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Mingxin Yao & Ying Wei

  2. Faculty of Foreign Languages, Harbin Institute of Petroleum, Harbin, 150028, Heilongjiang, People’s Republic of China

    Huiyu Wang

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  1. Mingxin Yao
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  2. Ying Wei
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Correspondence to Ying Wei.

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Yao, M., Wei, Y. & Wang, H. Promoting research by reducing uncertainty in academic writing: a large-scale diachronic case study on hedging in Science research articles across 25 years. Scientometrics 128, 4541–4558 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04759-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04759-6

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