This article investigates how sensationalism in the scientific literature and popular media influence each other with the use of a case study: host manipulation by parasites. The author defines host manipulation by parasites as “Certain parasites have evolved the ability to alter the phenotype of their hosts in ways that favour the transmission to another host or to an environment suitable for reproduction”. Both the popular media – online newspapers and magazines – and the scientific literature use certain sensational words to describe this phenomenon. In the scientific literature, the high and increasing number of publications that use the word “hijack” or “zombie” is particularly striking.

The author goes into the advantages and disadvantages of scientific metaphores. As advantages he mentions that scientific metaphores can be used as a tool that helps research think about their study systems, which may result in novel explanations, and that they can bring researchers with differing perspectives together. The downsides are that metaphores highlight certain aspects of a phenomenon, but hide others, metaphores are inherently vague and can thus have numerous, contradicting interpretations, and they are hard to quantify or otherwise measure. He names reification – treating the metaphore as if it is part of nature – as the most important downside. In addition, he shortly touches upon the illusory truth effect “repeated statements, be they true or false, can form the foundations of false memories that are gradually accepted as fact”, which may influence both specialist and non-specialist readers. Finally, the author nicely illustrates the use of scientific metaphores in both popular media and the scientific literature with two examples, and hypothesizes on a causal relationship between the use of anthropomorphic concepts and some misleading claims in the scientific literature. Finally, he concludes that scientific metaphores have advantages, but they should be used with caution.