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Increasing Use of Promotional Language in Orthopaedic Surgery Abstracts-An Analysis of 112,916 Abstracts 1985 to 2020
Ryan T Halvorson1, Liam H Wong, Brian T Feeley
1From the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA.
Background:
Increasing use of "hype" language (eg, language overstating research impact) has been documented in the scientific community. Evaluating language in abstracts is important because readers may use abstracts to extrapolate findings to entire publications. Our purpose was to assess the frequency of hype language within orthopaedic surgery.
Methods:
One hundred thirty-nine hype adjectives were previously identified using a linguistics approach. All publicly available abstracts from 18 orthopaedic surgery journals between 1985 and 2020 were obtained, and hype adjectives were tabulated. Change in frequency of these adjectives was calculated.
Results:
A total of 112,916 abstracts were identified. 67.0% (948/1414) of abstracts in 1985 contained hype adjectives, compared with 92.5% (5287/5714) in 2020. The average number of hype adjectives per abstract increased by 136% (1.1 to 2.6). Of the 139 adjectives, 87 (62.5%) increased in frequency and 40 (28.7%) decreased in frequency while 12 (9%) were not used. The hype adjectives with the largest absolute increases in frequency were quality (+324wpm), significant (+320wpm), systematic (+246wpm), top (+239wpm), and international (+201wpm). The five hype adjectives with the largest relative increases in frequency were novel (+10500%), international (+2850%), urgent (+2600%), robust (+2300%), and emerging (+1400%).
Conclusion:
Promotional language is increasing in orthopaedic surgery abstracts. Authors, editors, and reviewers should seek to minimize the usage of nonobjective language.
