Are 18 years really nothing? An updated review of the correct, partial and incorrect use of the terms ‘hypotheses’ and ‘predictions’ in ecology

Abstract

In 2003, I published an article in Ecología Austral revealing that most manuscripts used the terms hypotheses and predictions incorrectly. That article explained and exemplified the reasons for that confusion, described the basic concepts of the hypothetical-deductive method (MHD) and ended with some guidelines for its proper use. Here, I evaluated again the adequate use of MHD in the manuscripts published in Ecología Austral after the publication of that paper, to determine the potential influence of the original revision 18 years after its publication. I reviewed a total of 691 articles published between 2015 and 2019; 241 in Ecología Austral, 152 in Oikos and 298 in Ecology. Compared with the results of the period analyzed in the original work (1997-2001), the publications in Ecología Austral that used the MHD doubled, while those that correctly used the terms hypotheses and predictions showed a 7-fold increase. This increase did not respond to a general trend in ecological publications, since it was not detected in the English-speaking journals analyzed. These results suggest a positive influence of the original revision where these concepts were discussed in 2003. Alternative hypotheses are discussed that could also cause this pattern. Given the relatively low number of citations of Farji-Brener (2003), these results question the citation number as a precise estimator of the impact of certain kind of manuscripts, and illustrate the importance of writing articles in Spanish that help the development of research in ecology, although normally are undervalued in formal instances of academic evaluation.