Of use of the active voice by scientists
Immediately before the ScienceOnline2001 meeting, well-known science writer Carl Zimmer wrote a piece on his blog titled Death to Obfuscation! In it he wrote,
[…] Scientists have a fierce passion for the passive voice. I suspect it has to do with the abject humility that they claim as a virtue of their profession. No one has the temerity to actually write, ‘We discovered X.’ Instead, ‘X was discovered.’
I agreed with the sound advice the article offered but I wondered a little about the claims about what scientists do and don’t.
So let me channel the spirit of this tweet from Tom Levenstein (retweeted via Gloria Lloyd and others):
Be as critical and curious about craft of writing as you would be about science.
My instinctive response to Carl’s example that no scientist would dare write ‘we discovered’ was to think it had two issues, not one. One the voice being used, active or passive, as he pointed out; the other being the use of the word ‘discovered’, which in many settings would be avoided as seeming too grand.
My next thought was ‘we observed’, a more modest replacement for ‘we discovered’. Wouldn’t that be common, I thought? Heck, I swore I’d read it in the last paper I was just reading. I looked back and sure enough, there it was.
Hmm.
I decided to informally examine if the accepted wisdom that scientists never used the active voice, or at least very rarely used it, by searching PubMed. (It is the accepted wisdom, I don’t doubt that, I just wondered how true it really was.)
PubMed is an archive of abstracts–the summaries at the head of research articles–hosted by the US National Library of Medicine, with links to the full articles, citations and whatnot. Nominally PubMed covers medical journals, but in practice it covers most, if not all, areas of biology.
A little trick* I’ve picked up is that you can search the PubMed abstracts from Google by using a search of the form:
site:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ “we observed”
The first part specifies that site to be searched. The second part is a phrase being searched. This allows you to search on words that PubMed does not consider keywords and to use quoted phrases, which ask Google to match the complete phrase rather than search for the words in the phrase separately.
I first searched for ‘we’ and from the top ten pages of results collected the word followed the ‘we’, recording it if it was in the past tense. I then ran searches on those phrases. PubMed claims to have over 20 million citations. Here’s what I found, first the number of matches, then the word or phrase searched (Google always places ‘about’ before the count; I’ve omitted this for clarity):
8,440,000 we
443,000 “we found” (158,000 “we found that”)
200,000 “we investigated”
172,000 “we examined”
136,000 “we used”
79,800 “we compared”
73,900 “we observed” (19,900 “we observed that”)
54,700 “we measured”
47,500 “we determined”
31,800 “we reviewed”
24,700 “we aimed”
9,720 “we estimated”
5,240 “we discovered”
5,970 “we considered”
2,070 “we derived”
1,910 “we noticed”
1,820 “we saw”
1,590 “we assumed”
1,180 “we questioned”
1,110 “we modeled” (+ 261 “we modelled”)
581 “we increased”
525 “we improved”
500 “we reduced”
406 “we profiled”
228 “we learnt”
52 “we summarised”
39 “we realised”
21 “we helped”
Certainly less than a majority of abstracts use the active voice–there are over 20 million citations in the total sample–but that said it’s sizeable minority.
Would you conclude that a fair number of scientists ‘have the temerity’ to write in the active voice in the research literature? (One problem is the use of the ‘royal’ we, which I haven’t attempted to address.)
It would be useful to break this down by type of article (review, commentary, and so on) and research journal, but this will have to do for now.
Likewise, it would be interesting to compare the use of these phrases over time. You might hope that this is a growing trend, but it may prove that there has always been a minority favouring the active voice.
Update
I missed Sylvia McLain’s (aka Girl, Interrupting) article and the ensuing discussion when I wrote the article above. Recommended reading for those interested in this topic.
Footnote
* Yes, that word that some global warming critics have misread.
Some other science communication articles on Code for life:
Fact or fallacy, a survey of immunisation statements in the print media
Banished from science writing. Words, that is.
Desk Guide for Covering Science, and academic conferences
How long does it take you to write a science blog post?
17 Responses to “Of use of the active voice by scientists”
I took a class on science writing for abstracts and research papers, and using the active voice was one of the first things our teacher emphasized to us. Great post, interesting to consider!
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I blogged about a study of this issue in the American Medical Writers Journal:
http://scientopia.org/blogs/whizbang/2010/12/13/an-active-study/
Scientific articles use far more passive voice than technical articles in the Wall Street Journal. The question remains is that necessarily bad?
The real tragedy is that so many of the people who talk blithely about the passive voice — for and against — simply have no idea what they are spouting about. Read this and weep.
Pascale,
Writing as a scientist for a moment, I’m not really bothered either way provided the work is conveyed clearly and accurately: that’s the bit that’s important for the science.
FWIW—and bearing in mind I’m no expert on writing—I dislike hard-and-fast writing rules. I prefer to understand what it is each writing element achieves, or doesn’t, and think about what you’re trying to achieve with the particular piece of writing.
I prefer an active voice. We used “we ….” quite a bit in a recent paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004258 I’ll have to look at some of my other publications and see how frequently I do this; it’s not something I’ve really thought about previously.
Tara,
Let us know what you find.
In at least one of my papers I used the passive voice. It was a sole author paper and ‘I’ just didn’t feel right! (Erm. No pun intended.) When I was writing this I was reminded of it and wondered if there is safety in numbers! I have seen one or two sole author papers use ‘I’, however, so it is done.
I suspect some journals (and their editors) encourage the passive, perhaps seeing it as part of the “house style”. It’s one reason I would have liked to break this down by journal. It’d be interesting to hear from editors on this.
All of my journal publications (chemistry) have largely used passive voice, although I think once or twice it has been necessary to use the odd “we”.
Not sure how I would feel about “active voice” it would be quite a shift.
In my (limited) experience science _education_ articles use the active voice…
So looking at my research papers only (reviews are a bit different), more than half use “we”–maybe not for every single description, but at least quite a bit in the manuscript. Of the ones which use more passive voice, most were primarily written by others with less input from me (I’m a middle author). So looks like I tend to favor the active voice. (A few other freely available papers: http://www.aaem.pl/pdf/17331.pdf, http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/14/12/1925.htm, http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040256 (more of a review, but still includes “we will review” and similar language), and http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/77/2/696?view=long&pmid=21097587 (subscription required alas, but includes “we sampled” and similar language). Most of my in-draft manuscripts also use this, and the ones listed are published in a variety of journals so it seems they’ve not edited out this language.
Thanks Tara. I remember reading that one you did with Steve Novella.
I wonder if writing on-line or for general public steers writers to using the active voice more? Who knows!
Many of mine are describing databases, so most of the description is more along the lines of “the database does” than “we did”.
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In similar vein, here’s a survey of sentence adverbs in PubMed central papers: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/interestingly-the-sentence-adverbs-of-pubmed-central/
Interestingly (heh!), the most common is ‘Finally,’.