ReviewCureus2026
Expressive Punctuation and Subjective Adjectives in Biomedical Abstracts for Scholarly Communication.
Review in Cureus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Abstracts of academic publications are central instruments of scholarly communication to summarize research findings. In addition, they can signal authors' stance and evaluation. This study examined how small markers of feeling and stance appear in biomedical abstracts, focusing on expressive punctuation marks and subjective adjectives. We analyzed 23,621,448 PubMed abstracts from journal articles published by 2026, identifying selected expressive punctuation marks, such as "!" and "?", and subjective participial adjectives, such as "interested" and "surprising". We then explored their temporal patterns and associations with country of affiliation, authorship, and journal impact factor. We found that these terms were uncommon but far from absent. Question marks appeared in 0.64% of abstracts and exclamation marks in 0.03%. Several markers of curiosity, enthusiasm, and surprise increased over recent decades. Abstracts with East Asian affiliations generally contained fewer such terms, whereas exclamatory usage was most common among abstracts with affiliations in India, and a question mark and subjective adjectives were more common among abstracts with Western affiliations. Abstracts from articles with fewer authors were generally more likely to include expressive punctuation marks and subjective adjectives. Abstracts with inferred female authors, especially inferred female last authors, were more likely to contain "!", "?", "interested", and "surprised". Conversely, "excited", "exciting", "interesting", and "surprising" were more common in abstracts with inferred male authors. Exclamation marks, question marks, "interested", and "interesting" were less prevalent in high-impact journals, whereas "shocked" and "surprising" were more prevalent in these journals. These findings suggest that subjective descriptions in scientific writing can reflect broader norms of scholarly communication. Such markers may serve as prompts for considering how abstracts frame novelty, uncertainty, and importance, thereby helping improve scholarly communication.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.