GROUND BREAKING SCIENCE ROCKETS CMCC TO FOREFRONT OF HEALTH SCIENCES RESEARCH

By: Dr. Brian Budgell

Really? Well, no.

But a hyperbolic headline does at least get people to read the research. And that is one of the points of the latest in a series of articles about ‘hype’ in health sciences publications. Hype has been the theme of five peerreviewed papers published by the team of Neil Millar, a linguist at Tsukuba University in Japan and me, Brian Budgell, Director of Life Sciences Laboratories at CMCC.

Millar and I have been conducting language research together for more than 15 years and define hype as language used to glamorize, promote and/or exaggerate aspects of research. In particular, it involves using unnecessarily judgement-laden language where something more objective would serve just as well. Everyday examples would be ‘totally awesome’ and ‘perfect,’ which are often used in reference to things which are frankly not very interesting and decidedly imperfect. But why would scientists, who are supposed to be objective, resort to such language, and does the use of hype undermine the credibility of research?

The ‘why’ is a complex matter, but it is clear that hype is a recent and rapidly growing trend, not just in science but across all uses of the English language. Interesting and concurrent trends in research writings include an increase in emotive language in general, politicized language, and references to oneself (I or me), versus references to others or to the scientific work itself. And so, we can say that the growth in hype is just part of a trend in the evolution of biomedical language within what has been called the ‘attention economy.’ It is no longer good enough to do good science. We now have to sell ourselves and our work to journal publishers, funders and social media.

Perhaps surprisingly, in a recent study published in JAMA Network Open, we discovered a logarithmic increase in the use of hype in abstracts of grant applications to the NIH. Favourite terms with authors were ‘novel’ and ‘innovative,’ which are now used so often that they have become meaningless. One author, who just couldn’t resist, even described their work as a ‘novel innovation!’ What does that even mean? Other terms which have appeared very recently and have sky-rocketed in use include ‘transdisciplinary’ (up more than 7,600% since it first appeared) and ‘transformative’ (up almost 8,200%).

Interestingly, and in response to some of the buzz around our first NIH study, we went back and looked at the funding announcements that the NIH was making. Perhaps by now you would not be surprised to know that the government’s own announcements showed similar increases in hype over the years. But more than this, there was a very close correlation between the growth of specific hype words in the announcements and in the subsequent grant applications. In other words, if the funder says they want ‘innovative’ proposals, then researchers respond by announcing that their proposal is ‘innovative;’ if the funder wants ‘impactful’ proposals, then the researchers declare that their work is ‘impactful.’

What we now want to know is whether hype is undermining the value of health care research – is it misleading clinicians into making incorrect decisions for their patients based on the exaggerated claims of the researchers? A pilot study looking at this phenomenon has already been successfully completed and the team is now gearing up for a full-scale study which they claim will be impactful, transformative, innovative... well, you get it.