WHAT makes a scientific paper “surprising” or “unexpected”? Michal Jasienski believes the rapid increase in the frequency of these words in papers’ titles is simply a bid by the authors to stand out amid the deluge of publications.
Every minute, on average, two papers are added to the Science Citation Index. When Jasienski, a statistician at National-Louis University in Nowy Sacz, Poland, searched the index he found just 48 occurrences of “surprising” and “unexpected” in titles between 1900 and 1955, but 1660 between 2001 and 2005. The average annual increase in the figure is 10 per cent. At…
