# On the Rigour of Scientific Writing: Criteria, Analysis, and Insights

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09741/) (2022)
- [Generative Representational Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09906/) (2024)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [Inconsistency in Conference Peer Review: Revisiting the 2014 NeurIPS Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09774/) (2021)
- [Has the Machine Learning Review Process Become More Arbitrary as the Field Has Grown? The NeurIPS 2021 Consistency Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03262/) (2023)
- [Measuring Sentence-Level and Aspect-Level (Un)certainty in Science Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14776/) (2021)
- [On "Scientific Debt" in NLP: A Case for More Rigour in Language Model Pre-Training Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02870/) (2023)
- [Do not Mask Randomly: Effective Domain-adaptive Pre-training by Masking In-domain Keywords](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07160/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05151/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Write Reliable Rubrics? A Meta-Evaluation for Experiment Reproduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12835/) (2026)
- [HiRAS: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Paper-to-Code Generation and Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17745/) (2026)
- [RIGOURATE: Quantifying Scientific Exaggeration with Evidence-Aligned Claim Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04350/) (2026)
- [A Missing Piece for Trustworthy AI Reviewers: From Benchmarking Rhetorical Robustness to SciCore Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39027/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rigour is crucial for scientific research as it ensures the reproducibility and validity of results and findings. Despite its importance, little work exists on modelling rigour computationally, and there is a lack of analysis on whether these criteria can effectively signal or measure the rigour of scientific papers in practice. In this paper, we introduce a bottom-up, data-driven framework to automatically identify and define rigour criteria and assess their relevance in scientific writing. Our framework includes rigour keyword extraction, detailed rigour definition generation, and salient criteria identification. Furthermore, our framework is domain-agnostic and can be tailored to the evaluation of scientific rigour for different areas, accommodating the distinct salient criteria across fields. We conducted comprehensive experiments based on datasets collected from two high impact venues for Machine Learning and NLP (i.e., ICLR and ACL) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in modelling rigour. In addition, we analyse linguistic patterns of rigour, revealing that framing certainty is crucial for enhancing the perception of scientific rigour, while suggestion certainty and probability uncertainty diminish it.