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Over‐promotion and caution in abstracts of preprints during the COVID‐19 crisis
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“Further, abstracts are often criticized for overstating significant findings compared to the respective papers’ full texts and are therefore even referred to as a “promotional genre”31,32.”
From Scientific publications that use promotional language in the abstract receive more citations and public attention (2025) · cites this paper as [31]
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PRISMA for Abstracts: Reporting Systematic Reviews in Journal and Conference Abstracts
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Cited by
Stavrova, O., Kleinberg, B., Evans, A. M., & Ivanović, M. (2025) · Communications Psychology · doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00293-8 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Bordignon, F., Ermakova, L., & Noel, M.
- Affiliations
- Ecole des Ponts ParisTech Marne‐La‐Vallée France
- Université de Bretagne Occidentale, HCTI Brest France
- LISIS, CNRS, INRAE Université Gustave Eiffel Marne‐La‐Vallée France
- Venue
- Learned Publishing
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2021-07-21
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 622-636
- ISSN
- 0953-1513 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-4857
- PMC
- PMC8441756
- OpenAlex
- W3185872250
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 5
- FWCI
- 50.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Learned Publishing (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication
- Keywords
- abstracts, preprints, COVID-19 pandemic, promotional discourse, hedging, positive words, negative words, modal verbs, science communication, research promotion
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