Food for thought! This research confirms that climate change and the environment are treated by too many scientists more like modern religions than science!
What is particularly disturbing is that subjective science articles may get more future citations than more neutral ones.
Most of these research results have been well known or strongly suspected for decades.
"... about how journal authors use subjective and emotional language when describing environmental or climate change–related issues more often than when writing about other topics.
Looking at 170,000 articles published between 1990 and 2023, they find that “subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12 percent in economics and by 42 percent in science.” They also find articles that use subjective language receive more citations than those that do not."
From the abstract:
"Objective science aims to uncover truths about environmental conditions, including those related to emission trends, biodiversity loss, climate change, and their economic costs.
When and why do scientists use subjective language to describe these conditions with bias, emotion, or advocacy? To shed light, we study determinants and trends in subjective language within the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions of over 170,000 peer-reviewed articles published during 1990-2023 in top economics and science journals.
Using machine learning to label and score text by subjectivity, we find that subjective language is more prevalent in articles focused on environmental topics relative to non-environmental topics: by 12% in economics and by 42% in science.
After accounting for factors such as article age, author experience, number of authors, and journal quality, higher subjectivity scores associate positively with future academic citations in both science and economics, especially if the article is focused on an environmental topic.
These findings, which imply subjective language has been rewarded in the academy, are consistent with informal theory suggesting subjective language will be used more frequently by scientists when expected rewards are high and risks are low."
No comments:
Post a Comment