The Power of “We” in Science Funding and Publication

Linguistic communication supports all stages of scientific innovation. However, we have limited understanding of rhetorical strategies for facilitating the recognition of new ideas in science. Drawing on prior literature on the importance of personal pronouns in inter-personal communication, we examine the unique role of first-person plural pronouns (``We'' words, including ``we'', ``us'', ``our'') in science funding and publishing. Our study leverages the full sample of 13K grant proposals submitted to the Novo Nordisk Foundation and 47K research papers submitted to BMJO and ICLR between 2011 and 2024. We find a strong and universal positive association between ``we'' words and success rates even after accounting for important confounding factors related to content, novelty, and author impact.Specifically, a one percentage point increase in the percentage of ``We'' words used in the full text is associated with a 36-51% increase in the odds of success for grants and papers.Furthermore, we find that the effect of ``We'' is applicable to both editors and reviewers of BMJO papers that used the single-blind review and is predictive of more positive and engaging review feedback for ICLR papers that employed the double-blind review.Crucially, a large-scale LLM-assisted computational experiment that replaces ``We'' words with demonstrative pronouns provides robust causal evidence of ``We'' words on paper acceptance.Lastly, our causal mediation analysis shows that ``We'' words can lead to more acceptance mainly because they can increase the perceived teamwork, credibility, significance, and robustness in research evaluation.By revealing the unique strength of ``We'' in facilitating the recognition of new ideas in science, our study highlights the importance of small but mighty linguistic choices in promoting knowledge discoveries and breakthroughs.