Good find.

Robert’s article does not go into depth as to why scientists are hyping their findings, but it does suggest publication pressure. Thus, journals that are not part of the 20 high impact journals, as the article calls them, may be more prone to publish if the hype gets the news media’s attention (giving these journals pseudo credibility), and the scientists get published so that they don’t perish.

The article also mentions that the overuse of positive-sounding words could blur the distinction between the qualities of findings, in which case “… words used to describe scientific results are no longer driven by the content but by marketability.”

Publication and marketability. It sounds like Pons and Fleischmann all over again, when they bypassed peer reviewed publication and went straight to the media with their hyped cold fusion “discovery.” Of course, they only succeeded in marketing themselves into a nice laboratory and lifestyle on the French Riviera, not in creating a new energy generator. Maybe one of these decades someone will *actually* discover cold fusion.

It sounds a little like NASA’s impossible space drive:
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/dont-buy-stock-yet-in-that-impossible-space-drive/

Meanwhile, are over-hyped science papers as scientific as they should be, or is someone just trying to get additional funding to cover their livelihoods for the next year or so?