Writing a research article is difficult for many reasons. First, there are many things that need to be done besides writing, such as generating the figures. Second, a research article is typically several thousand words long, so there is a lot of writing to do and many decisions to make (such as what to include and what to leave out). Third, most articles have multiple authors, so it will be necessary to circulate drafts to co-authors and act on their feedback. In this article we will focus on the second of these tasks – the act of writing the article itself.

All writing that is intended for publication should be clear and engaging, and the authors of scientific articles can use a wide range of persuasive communication devices to achieve these goals. An obvious example is to give the article an eye-catching title, and this is perfectly fine if the title reflects the content of the paper. However, it is also possible for these devices to be mis-used in ways that can mislead readers (including reviewers) by, for example, giving a false impression about the significance of the work being reported. Clearly, this is not fine.

In this article – which builds on a preprint we posted in March 2022 (Corneille et al., 2022) – we describe a range of persuasive communication devices that can be used to exaggerate the importance of and/or hide the weaknesses of scientific work, and urge authors to exercise caution when thinking about using such devices.

Corneille, O., Havemann, J., Henderson, EL., Jzerman, HI., Hussey, I., Orban de Xivry, JJ., Jussim, L., Holmes, NP., Pilacinski, A., Beffara, B., Carroll, H., Outa, NO., Lush, P. &  Lotter, LD. (2023) Point of View: Beware ‘persuasive communication devices’ when writing and reading scientific articles eLife 12:e88654
Publisher (Open Access): https://elifesciences.org/articles/88654