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Article published In:
Language and Covid-19
Edited by Michaela Mahlberg and Gavin Brookes
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26:4] 2021
► pp. 444–468

The Covid infodemic

Competition and the hyping of virus research

| University of East Anglia
| Jilin University

Covid-19, the greatest global health crisis for a century, brought a new immediacy and urgency to international bio-medical research. The pandemic generated intense competition to produce a vaccine and contain the virus, creating what the World Health Organization referred to as an ‘infodemic’ of published output. In this frantic atmosphere, researchers were keen to get their research noticed. In this paper, we explore whether this enthusiasm influenced the rhetorical presentation of research and encouraged scientists to “sell” their studies. Examining a corpus of the most highly cited SCI articles on the virus published in the first seven months of 2020, we explore authors’ use of hyperbolic and promotional language to boost aspects of their research. Our results show a significant increase in hype to stress certainty, contribution, novelty and potential, especially regarding research methods, outcomes and primacy. Our study sheds light on scientific persuasion at a time of intense social anxiety.

Keywords: Covid research, hype, academic persuasion, scientific writing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The infodemic
  • 2.The hyping of medical research
  • 3.Corpus and analysis
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1How much hyping is there?
    • 4.2What are the most common hyping devices?
    • 4.3What aspects of research are most hyped?
    • 4.4Has hyping behaviour changed during the pandemic?
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20160.hyl
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