ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The rise of large language models and the direction and impact of US federal research funding.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The institutional dynamics of inequality for women inventors who break with conventional thinking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The distinctive innovation patterns and network embeddedness of scientific prizewinners.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Impact upfront: novel format for Novo Nordisk Foundation funding.Health research policy and systems · 2025Review
- Scientific publications that use promotional language in the abstract receive more citations and public attention.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The impact of investigator bias in nutrition research.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Should Artificial Intelligence Play a Durable Role in Biomedical Research and Practice?International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Use of Promotional Language in Grant Applications and Grant Success.JAMA network open · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here, we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which may help to convey an innovative idea's originality and significance. Our analysis attempts to surmount the limitations of prior grant studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies: the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world's largest private science funding foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas by funders and other scientists. First, a grant proposal's percentage of promotional language is associated with up to a doubling of the grant's probability of being funded. Second, a grant's promotional language reflects its intrinsic innovativeness. Third, the percentage of promotional language is predictive of the expected citation and productivity impact of publications that are supported by funded grants. Finally, a computer-assisted experiment that manipulates the promotional language in our data demonstrates how promotional language can communicate the merit of ideas through cognitive activation. With the incidence of promotional language in science steeply rising, and the pivotal role of grants in converting promising and aspirational ideas into solutions, our analysis provides empirical evidence that promotional language is associated with effectively communicating the merits of innovative scientific ideas.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.