On the quest for novelty in ecology

Abstract

AbstractThe volume of scientific publications is ever-increasing, making it difficult for scholars to publish papers that can capture the attention of readers. An obvious way to attract readership is by making a truly significant discovery; yet another way may involve tweaking the language to overemphasize the novelty of results. Using a dataset of 52,236 paper abstracts published between 1997 and 2017 in 17 ecological journals, we inspected whether the relative frequency of the use of novelty (e.g. ‘groundbreaking’, ‘new’) and confirmatory (e.g. ‘replicated’, ‘reproducibility’) terms has increased over time. Further, we tested whether relationships exist between the use of these terms and either Impact Factor of the journal a paper had been published in or number of citations a paper had received. The frequency of novelty terms almost doubled between 1997 and 2017, and was positively related to the journal Impact Factor and the number of citations. Conversely, no such patterns were found for confirmatory terms. We argue that, while increasing research opportunities are possibly triggering advances in ecology, the writing style and publishing habits should better reflect the inherent confirmatory nature of ecological research. The possible causes and consequences that such language-use matter may have for the scientific and broader community remain unknown, and we call for opening a discussion among researchers.