Does peer review make scientists use more cautious language?
Analysis of bioscience journals reveals peer review does introduce more discussion of studies’ limitations
The language found in research papers isn’t more carefully crafted language after peer review but they do include more on the potential limitations of the work, a new study has found.
The study compared the language of 446 randomised control trial reports, published in biosciences journals in 2015, before and after they went through peer review. Using two software tools they previously created, the authors detected the language used to describe limitations and linguistic hedges.