On the quest for novelty in ecology

The volume of scientific publications continues to grow, making it increasingly challenging for scholars to publish papers that capture readers attention. While making a truly significant discovery is one way to attract readership, another approach may involve tweaking the language to overemphasize the novelty of results. Using a dataset of 52,236 paper abstracts published between 1997 and 2017 in 17 ecological journals, we found that the relative frequency of novelty terms (e.g. groundbreaking, innovative) nearly doubled over time. All journals but one exhibited a positive trend in the use of novelty terms during the studied period. Conversely, we found no such trend for confirmatory terms (e.g. confirm, replicated). Importantly, only papers using novelty terms were associated with significantly higher citation counts and were more often published in journals with a higher impact factor. While increasing research opportunities are surely driving advances in ecology, the writing style of authors and the publishing habits of journals may better reflect the inherently confirmatory nature of ecological research. We call for an open discussion among researchers about the potential reasons and implications of this language-use and scientometrics issue.