Promoting research by reducing uncertainty in academic writing: a large-scale diachronic case study on hedging in Science research articles across 25 years

Hedges are important in academic writing since they indicate uncertainty and tentativeness about academic knowledge. However, few studies explore how hedges have changed in academic writing overtime. Among the existing studies, there is also divergent understandings. The current case study traced the diachronic development of hedges that express doubt and uncertainty in the full texts of Science research articles from 1997 to 2021. Our findings show that the use of such hedges has significantly decreased in the past 25 years in the research articles of the Journal Science. In addition, we propose that the drop of such hedges in Science research articles may be an implicit writing strategy for research promotion, and therefore may correlate with the rising linguistic positivity in academic writing. Our hypothesis was initially confirmed by the significant correlation between the evolution of hedges and Yuan and Yao’s (Scientometrics 127:1–17, 2022) sentiment scores in academic writing. Our findings may reveal a bigger picture of promoting research by adopting not only explicit strategies such as more positive language (Yuan and Yao in Scientometrics 127:1–17, 2022) but also subtle and implicit writing strategies such as reducing uncertainty. Finally, we discussed the implications of this study for peer reviewers, editors, and researchers.