Rise of hype see more and more ‘novel’, ‘critical’ and ‘key’ grant applications

A steady and dramatic increase in ‘hype’ in the abstracts of successful grant applications funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) since the mid-1980s has been documented by a new analysis.

The researchers from Japan and Canada, who work in applied linguistics, biomedical research and machine learning, found that the prevalence of 130 out of 139 ‘hype adjectives’ increased by an average of more than 1300% in successful applications submitted to the NIH between 1985 and 2020. The study analysed more than 900,000 NIH abstracts with the researchers coding adjectives as non-hype or hype based on how promotional they were in context, and whether they could be removed or replaced by a less subjective word without changing a sentence’s meaning.