This article studies the linguistic realization of hypes when reporting results of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) which are considered the best research design to minimize bias in biomedical experiments. Nevertheless, the authors detect 2.0 occurrences of hypes per 1000 words in their corpus, which does not meet the expected objectivity in this particular scientific writing genre. The authors' choice to work on a small corpus (24 RCTs) they can thoroughly annotate in the manner of a "mediating ethnographic specialist informant" is an interesting methodological approach that provides valuable elements for future works in hyping studies.

They identified promotional language markers by judging whether a particular linguistic item could be replaced with a neutral alternative. Although they rely on a traditional definition of hype, based on the use of subjective language to over-promote results, this "test" of whether neutral language can be adopted instead could serve as a complementary definition. Authors have annotated the hyping terms, their grammatical category and the sections of the text they occur in. They have also identified the functional target of the hype according to 7 categories (i.e., general field of study or particular topic under investigation, authors explicitly identifying themselves, research methods, outcome and conclusion, and claim for primacy). Their results are the frequency of hypes cross-tabulated by functional target and section and show that hypes occur most frequently in the Discussion and Introduction sections. Also, adjectives and adverbs are used most frequently.

Given the frequency of the phenomenon in peer-reviewed papers, the authors assume that hyping is tolerable to authors, editors and publishers. They also show the tensions that authors face, torn between some journals guidelines encouraging them to highlight the innovative aspect of their results, whereas other guidelines are contradictory and require that results be conveyed with fidelity.