# Measuring and Analyzing Subjective Uncertainty in Scientific Communications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21114 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21114/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2025.

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

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [Measuring Sentence-Level and Aspect-Level (Un)certainty in Science Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14776/) (2021)
- [The Possible, the Plausible, and the Desirable: Event-Based Modality Detection for Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08037/) (2021)
- [What's in a Name? -- Gender Classification of Names with Character Based Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03692/) (2021)
- [The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06414/) (2017)
- [Quantifying echo chamber effects in information spreading over political communication networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03688/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Uncertainty Quantification in Drug Discovery with Censored Regression Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04313/) (2024)
- [A simple method for estimating the Lorenz curve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15291/) (2021)
- [Annotating Scientific Uncertainty: A comprehensive model using linguistic patterns and comparison with existing approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11376/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Uncertainty of scientific findings are typically reported through statistical metrics such as p-values, confidence intervals, etc. The magnitude of this objective uncertainty is reflected in the language used by the authors to report their findings primarily through expressions carrying uncertainty-inducing terms or phrases. This language uncertainty is a subjective concept and is highly dependent on the writing style of the authors. There is evidence that such subjective uncertainty influences the impact of science on public audience. In this work, we turned our focus to scientists themselves, and measured/analyzed the subjective uncertainty and its impact within scientific communities across different disciplines. We showed that the level of this type of uncertainty varies significantly across different fields, years of publication and geographical locations. We also studied the correlation between subjective uncertainty and several bibliographical metrics, such as number/gender of authors, centrality of the field's community, citation count, etc. The underlying patterns identified in this work are useful in identification and documentation of linguistic norms in scientific communication in different communities/societies.