Over-promotion and caution in abstracts of preprints during the COVID-19 crisis.

ABSTRACT: 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,

SUBMITTER: Bordignon F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8441756 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature