Based on an analysis of over 32 million abstracts published over the last fifty years, Adrian Barnett and Nicole White find a marked rise in common spelling errors. Evidence they suggest of a culture of quantity over quality in academic writing.
Many academics feel pressure to publish lots of papers every year because demonstrating their productivity is key for securing jobs and promotions. A striking example of this pressure comes from Nobel laureate Peter Higgs when in 2013 he announced, “I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system”.
The pressure to publish could mean that thoughtful academics like Higgs are being outcompeted by their more prolific peers. A serious concern is that some academics may be cutting corners to produce papers quickly and remain competitive. Checks of robustness, such as running sensitivity analyses to verify results or waiting for a colleague’s feedback on a draft paper, may be perceived as too time-consuming to warrant delaying publication.
This kind of corner cutting also means that quantity is being prioritised over quality, and the literature is becoming clogged with poor quality papers. One consequence of this information overload is that it is increasingly difficult for academics to be well informed about the best and latest evidence.
Spelling errors on the rise
We examined spelling errors as a simple indicator of corner cutting. Spelling errors are less serious than other bad writing practices, such as plagiarism and spin, but they are easy to check across millions of papers.
We searched for errors in PubMed, which is a popular literature database in health and medical research. We examined over 32 million abstracts published between 1970 to 2023 and looked for spelling errors in the titles and abstracts of published papers, using common errors drawn from our experience as statisticians .
Fig.1 shows these spelling errors and the results. Eleven of the fifteen errors have increased over time, with most showing a strong increase. The total error rate has increased from 0.1 per ten thousand abstracts in 1970, to 8.7 per ten thousand in 2023.
Spelling errors are a symptom of researchers prioritising quantity over quality. We are literally seeing more “casual inference”. The overall error rates are low, however we only examined fifteen errors and these trends are likely to be repeated for other spelling errors, who knows how many ‘teh’s there are in the scholarly record.
Do spelling errors matter?
A spelling error does not undermine the content of a paper, and we have almost certainly published papers with spelling errors. However, these errors are easily avoidable and can be quickly removed using a word processor.
Spell checkers do not capture all errors, for example “odds ration” instead of “odds ratio”, but these mistakes can be detected by proofreading, which should be occurring given that all authors’ final approval is a recommended criterion for authorship. The increase in errors could be due to reduced budgets, with less money to pay for copyediting. There could also be less willingness to wait for professional feedback or a belief that errors will be corrected by publishers.
Authors should want to fix spelling errors, as a paper with many errors shows poor attention to detail and hence harms the paper’s chances of being accepted. When peer reviewers of grant applications in Australia were asked about the characteristics of high-scoring applications one of their criteria was “Well written (no spelling/grammatical errors)”.
Non-native English speakers
Some of the increase in spelling errors is likely due to an increase in researchers with English as a second language, and this increase in diversity and perspective has benefits for academia. We also don’t mean to criticise academics with dyslexia and recognise that academia is often a difficult place for people who do not write in the standard academic style.
Academics from non-English speaking countries could use AI tools to improve their writing and this would also reduce spelling errors. It will be interesting to see if these tools ultimately reverse the trend identified here. However, AI could also become a tool to make writing faster rather than better, and may worsen other writing problems such as vague and derivative text.
Less research, better research
The rise in spelling errors highlights the tension between working slowly and carefully versus publishing quickly. Ongoing efforts to improve research culture should stress the need to commit adequate time to research projects.
The statistician Doug Altman famously called for “less research, better research” back in 1994. Thirty years later we need even less research and much better research. What we don’t need is “reserach”.
The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
Image Credit: Rimma Bondarenko on Shutterstock.
Speaking of which: “…one of their criterion was…”. I guess spelling errors don’t include grammatical errors. On the other hand, most grammar checkers would have picked this one up. Maybe AI as well, but I haven’t done this experiment.
I apologize; I’m ashamed; I have recently published two papers, (i) with typo in one of my affiliations [thus, a non-existing University], and (ii) a (stupid) misprint in a person’s name in the title, never noticed by the … (author), reviewers, editor(s), publisher; the person’s name is correct in the text but not in the title; as you can guess, it was very hard to correct the misprint after I had accepted the galley proofs, – due to doi blocking; what an affair
My worst typo: “[…] which were studied for their potential antioxidant properties, and their application as flood flavouring agents”. Do you see it?
‘Taste’ means naught, to me;
but hail Tsunami.
JRTM
Quite improper: a bit too casual.
“The overall error rates are low, however we only examined fifteen errors and these trends are likely to be repeated for other spelling errors…”
How about punctuation errors, dear authors? Good bleedin’ grief!
“Academics from non-English speaking countries could use AI tools to improve their writing and this would also reduce spelling errors.”
Or, budget allowing, they could hire an English-language science editor with experience editing manuscripts for scientists whose first language is not English.
The buck really stops with the journals. To piggyback on what Andrew Kirsh said, any good editor would catch these common spelling errors, but more and more publishers are either outsourcing their editing to countries where English is not the first language or are eliminating editing entirely. (And frankly, plenty of authors whose first language is English have terrible spelling and grammar.)
I agree with Stephanie that a likely contributing factor, maybe the main factor, is the lack of attention paid by publishers to good English these days. 30 years ago, many journals had people fluent in English checking such matters in articles. Now, copy-editing is typically outsourced to places employing people whose command of English is not so great. I have had manuscripts come back (as proofs) from the publisher with maybe 10 corrections to English and punctuation but 20 new errors introduced.