War in the Abstract: The Rise and Consequences of Militarized Language in Scientific Communication
2026-06-22 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceComputers and SocietyDigital Libraries
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how often words related to war appear in scientific paper summaries from 2010 to 2025 and found a big increase, especially after 2019. They saw this pattern more in social sciences and in papers from countries with more conflicts, especially in the Global South. Then, they did an experiment showing that using war-like language made the science seem less trustworthy and reduced people's willingness to fund or support related policies. Overall, the authors suggest that while war language is becoming common in science writing, it might actually hurt how the work is received.
militaristic languagescientific abstractswar framingpersuasionGlobal SouthOpenAlexPubMedUppsala Conflict Data Programlarge-language modelsCOVID-19
Authors
Sovesh Mohapatra, David Lydon-Staley, Dani S. Bassett
Abstract
Scientists do not, by profession, wage war. Yet warfare's vocabulary consistently appears in their abstracts. To quantify the extent to which warfare's vocabulary pervades scientific abstracts, we analyze 21.4 million papers (2010-2025; OpenAlex, PubMed). We additionally run a within-subject war-framing experiment (N = 801; 32,040 trials) designed to provide causal insight into the effects of militaristic language on persuasion. Between 2010 and 2025, the presence of militaristic terms in scientific abstracts rose 48% in OpenAlex and 32% in PubMed, with the rise accelerating sharply after 2019 (cross-database r = 0.96, p < 10^-8). The prevalence of militaristic language is conflict-aligned at both country and annual scales (Uppsala Conflict Data Program; r = 0.77-0.84), with the abstracts from the Global South displaying the fastest rise in militaristic language. Among disciplines, social sciences leads in level of such language while engineering and computer science lead in growth. The COVID and post-2022 large-language-model eras also saw the rise and narrowed the language gap between native-English and non-English authors. In our follow-up experiment, we found that war framing reduced credibility (mean shift -0.18 Likert units, 95% CI [-0.21, -0.14]; d_z = -0.28, p < 10^-20), funding willingness (d_z = -0.12) and policy support (d_z = -0.08), with a trend-level increase in sense of urgency (d_z = +0.07). Collectively, findings reveal that while scientific abstracts drift toward warfare, the use of militaristic language may erode credibility, funding willingness, and policy support.