A study analyzing 21.4 million papers from OpenAlex and PubMed reveals that militaristic terms in scientific abstracts rose by 48% and 32%, respectively, between 2010 and 2025. This increase accelerated sharply after 2019 and correlates strongly with global conflict data at both country and annual scales. Social sciences exhibit the highest prevalence of such language, while engineering and computer science show the fastest growth rates. The analysis also notes that the COVID era and the post-2022 large-language-model period narrowed the linguistic gap between native-English and non-English authors. To assess the impact of this trend, researchers conducted a within-subject war-framing experiment involving 801 participants and over 32,000 trials. The experimental results demonstrated that war framing significantly reduced perceived credibility, funding willingness, and policy support among readers. Although there was a trend-level increase in the sense of urgency, the overall findings suggest that militaristic language may undermine the persuasive power of scientific communication.
Rise of Militarized Language in Scientific Abstracts Erodes Credibility
from English