‘Use the active voice whenever possible’: The Impact of Style Guidelines in Medical Journals
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medical writing is sometimes criticized for excessive use of the passive voice. The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to provide quantitative descriptions of how the passive voice is used in medical journals and (ii) to assess the impact of style guidelines encouraging use of the active voice. From a corpus of 297 primary research articles published in the top five medical journals, we extracted 19,691 passive constructions. Analyses show that guidelines have a significant effect on use of the passive voice, and that this is highly localized in the ‘Methods’ and ‘Results’ sections. Analyses also identify a core set of verbs which are strongly associated with the passive voice, and which play a central role in structuring the discourse. We argue that current guidelines influence author’s linguistic choices, and that although paraphrasing a sentence in the active voice may be possible, a passive alternative is sometimes preferable. Findings demonstrate the need for formative guidelines which better reflect the reality of conventionalized usage.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it