Semantics or pedantry?

SIGNIFICANT

This has been with us for decades. It is sometimes accompanied by statistical probability values in parentheses. It literally means “full of meaning or import” 1. Used alone it means the authors are stressing, but not justifying, the scientific importance of their results. Even if significant, the results are often unimportant, uninteresting and unconvincing. Unfortunately the word will be with us for many more decades.

ROBUST

Frequent use of the word started a decade or so ago, but its use now seems, thankfully, to be in decline. Its users seem to mean that their results and conclusions are beyond argument and must be accepted, since they are even more than significant. It literally means “strong, vigorous, healthy” 1. Some scientific statements claimed to be robust are like a house of cards.

PARADIGM

This is recently becoming more popular. I have encountered it 15 times in a few recent publications related to my own research interest (cough). The authors usually seem to mean that their results open a new and important understanding into a hitherto perplexing problem. It literally means “a pattern or example” 1. But it is also claimed to be “a buzzword deployed by dumb people wishing to sound important” 2. No less an authority than Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England, and possibly a scientist manqué) said: “Paradigm is a word too often used by those who would like to have a new idea but cannot think of one” 2.

Of course the use of “paradigm” is significant, but I hope the word is not so robust that its use in scientific literature survives the present decade.

To complete the analysis, Pubmed 3 gives 1,696,440 references to “significant”, 55,783 to “robust” and 47,082 to “paradigm”. This correspondence contains some paradigms, and it may require a robust but not very significant updating of these numbers.