Abstract
The volume of scientific publications is ever increasing, making it
difficult for scholars to publish papers that can capture the readers’
attention. 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
found that the relative frequency of the use of novelty terms (e.g.,
‘groundbreaking’, ‘new’) almost doubled over time. Conversely, we found
no such pattern with the use of confirmatory terms (e.g., ‘replicated’,
‘reproducibility’). We argue that, while increasing research
opportunities are triggering advances in ecology, the writing style of
authors and publishing habits of journals should better reflect the
inherent confirmatory nature of ecology.