May 26, 2023 - What makes some fields more prone to overpromising than others? There will be many factors influencing how scientists make promises, one of which is the discourse of the discipline. In ‘“Love is a microbe too”: Microbiome dialectics’, philosopher Hub Zwart tackles the field of micr...

May 13, 2023 - ' This is just a buzzword' is a common claim for accusing hype and little substance (p. 240). Sometimes, even mere prefixes like 'nano', 'smart', 'quantum', 'cloud', or 'green' generate enough attention to motivate investors, governments, and researchers alike to act now and shape ...

May 11, 2023 - This article is about hype in the sense of overstating positive effects by ignoring contradictory evidence. It relies on a two-pronged approach to demonstrate that popular and widespread claims about common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) in forests are not well supported. CMNs can be ...

Dec 01, 2022 - This is a note posted on the Peeriodical of "Hype and overpromising in science and technology." Whether ethics should engage with hypothetical future scenarios is particularly relevant to the study of hype and overpromising. This engagement can further hype or alarmism an...

Nov 23, 2022 - This is a note posted on the Peeriodical of "Hype and overpromising in science and technology." Both, hype and alarmism, describe the hyperbolic attention and expectation patterns of issues, often inducing negative consequences. Ragnar E. Löfstedt reconstructs and analyze...

Nov 23, 2022 - This article warns against overstating the representativity of empirical studies with generic terms..This use of generic language covers a wide range of categories referring for instance to classes of individuals (women, children, adults), concepts (social exclusion, statistical le...

Sep 30, 2022 - This is a note posted on the Peeriodical of "Hype and overpromising in science and technology." While many theorists study hype and overpromissing only in terms of attention and positive sentiments toward an imagined future (e.g., van Lente, 2013), Ann Mische (2009) propo...

Sep 30, 2022 - The road to HELs is paved with good intentions. High-energy lasers (HELs) have been subject to much hype over the past few decades, often driven by national defense concerns. The first half of the article concerns the basic history of laser weapons and in the second half the author...

Sep 27, 2022 - Based on the observation that health related information is often distorted and exaggerated in comparison with the scientific statements originally published in peer-reviewed articles, the authors demonstrate in this paper that the exaggeration originates in academic press releases...

Sep 26, 2022 - In this paper, the frequency of “hype” adjectives in abstracts of successful national institutes of health (NIH) grant applications are analyzed. First, all adjectives are extracted from the abstracts, and they assess the frequency in the most recent year, 2020, relative to the sta...

Jun 27, 2022 - In their chapter on "Expectations in Technological Developments", Harro van Lente and Arie Rip, for the first time (1998), introduce the coordinating role of "prospective structures" and the "promise-requirement cycle" in technology development (p. 217...

Jun 27, 2022 - Gartner's Hype Cycle diagram attracted increasing attention in the business world and, more recently, also in academia (see Ozgur and Steinert, 2016). The initial idea of a five-phased hype cycle over usually “five to eight years” is based on two equations, the bell-curve-shaped hy...

Jun 20, 2022 - Does ought imply can? Analytical philosophy has had much to say about promising and the relationship between what the promiser is obliged to do and what they can do. In her chapter “Promising Too Much” in the bundle Promises and Agreements: Philosophical Essays, philosopher Julia D...

Jun 20, 2022 - 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 t...

Jun 18, 2022 - In this paper, high-profile journals, European public funding and the emerging technologies market are presented as connected arenas of expectations where anticipatory practices are performed. Those are ways by which these expectations are produced and circulated (e.g.: letters pub...

May 06, 2022 - Contemplating possible future scenarios should be left to the field of philosophy, not to futurology – or so claims Luciano Floridi in this somewhat harsh but fair editor letter. Floridi examines so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI) winters and their impact on the development of ...

Apr 14, 2022 - This article gives an overview of the biomedical literature on spin. Spin is defined as: “a specific intentional or unintentional reporting that fails to faithfully reflect the nature and range of findings and that could affect the impression the results produce in readers”. The ov...

Apr 14, 2022 - The characterization of something as "hype" means to pose a problem. But what exactly constitutes the problem of hype? Broadly speaking, hype involves the exaggeration of the “significance or certainty of research findings” imposing risks on audiences (p. 1). According to...

Apr 14, 2022 - 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 ...