Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science

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 limi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2024-06, Vol.121 (25), p.e2320066121
Main Authors: Peng, Hao, Qiu, Huilian Sophie, Fosse, Henrik Barslund, Uzzi, Brian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communication
Creativity
Financing, Organized
Funding
Grants
Humans
Language
Physical Sciences
Research Support as Topic
Science
Social Sciences
United States
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2320066121