personal pronouns in research paper

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Can You Use First-Person Pronouns (I/we) in a Research Paper?

Research writers frequently wonder whether the first person can be used in academic and scientific writing. In truth, for generations, we’ve been discouraged from using “I” and “we” in academic writing simply due to old habits. That’s right—there’s no reason why you can’t use these words! In fact, the academic community used first-person pronouns until the 1920s, when the third person and passive-voice constructions (that is, “boring” writing) were adopted–prominently expressed, for example, in Strunk and White’s classic writing manual “Elements of Style” first published in 1918, that advised writers to place themselves “in the background” and not draw attention to themselves.

In recent decades, however, changing attitudes about the first person in academic writing has led to a paradigm shift, and we have, however, we’ve shifted back to producing active and engaging prose that incorporates the first person.

Can You Use “I” in a Research Paper?

However, “I” and “we” still have some generally accepted pronoun rules writers should follow. For example, the first person is more likely used in the abstract , Introduction section , Discussion section , and Conclusion section of an academic paper while the third person and passive constructions are found in the Methods section and Results section .

In this article, we discuss when you should avoid personal pronouns and when they may enhance your writing.

It’s Okay to Use First-Person Pronouns to:

• clarify meaning by eliminating passive voice constructions;
• establish authority and credibility (e.g., assert ethos, the Aristotelian rhetorical term referring to the personal character);
• express interest in a subject matter (typically found in rapid correspondence);
• establish personal connections with readers, particularly regarding anecdotal or hypothetical situations (common in philosophy, religion, and similar fields, particularly to explore how certain concepts might impact personal life. Additionally, artistic disciplines may also encourage personal perspectives more than other subjects);
• to emphasize or distinguish your perspective while discussing existing literature; and
• to create a conversational tone (rare in academic writing).

The First Person Should Be Avoided When:

• doing so would remove objectivity and give the impression that results or observations are unique to your perspective;
• you wish to maintain an objective tone that would suggest your study minimized biases as best as possible; and
• expressing your thoughts generally (phrases like “I think” are unnecessary because any statement that isn’t cited should be yours).

Usage Examples

The following examples compare the impact of using and avoiding first-person pronouns.

Example 1 (First Person Preferred):

To understand the effects of global warming on coastal regions,  changes in sea levels, storm surge occurrences and precipitation amounts  were examined .

[Note: When a long phrase acts as the subject of a passive-voice construction, the sentence becomes difficult to digest. Additionally, since the author(s) conducted the research, it would be clearer to specifically mention them when discussing the focus of a project.]

We examined  changes in sea levels, storm surge occurrences, and precipitation amounts to understand how global warming impacts coastal regions.

[Note: When describing the focus of a research project, authors often replace “we” with phrases such as “this study” or “this paper.” “We,” however, is acceptable in this context, including for scientific disciplines. In fact, papers published the vast majority of scientific journals these days use “we” to establish an active voice.   Be careful when using “this study” or “this paper” with verbs that clearly couldn’t have performed the action.   For example, “we attempt to demonstrate” works, but “the study attempts to demonstrate” does not; the study is not a person.]

Example 2 (First Person Discouraged):

From the various data points  we have received ,  we observed  that higher frequencies of runoffs from heavy rainfall have occurred in coastal regions where temperatures have increased by at least 0.9°C.

[Note: Introducing personal pronouns when discussing results raises questions regarding the reproducibility of a study. However, mathematics fields generally tolerate phrases such as “in X example, we see…”]

Coastal regions  with temperature increases averaging more than 0.9°C  experienced  higher frequencies of runoffs from heavy rainfall.

[Note: We removed the passive voice and maintained objectivity and assertiveness by specifically identifying the cause-and-effect elements as the actor and recipient of the main action verb. Additionally, in this version, the results appear independent of any person’s perspective.] 

Example 3 (First Person Preferred):

In contrast to the study by Jones et al. (2001), which suggests that milk consumption is safe for adults, the Miller study (2005) revealed the potential hazards of ingesting milk.  The authors confirm  this latter finding.

[Note: “Authors” in the last sentence above is unclear. Does the term refer to Jones et al., Miller, or the authors of the current paper?]

In contrast to the study by Jones et al. (2001), which suggests that milk consumption is safe for adults, the Miller study (2005) revealed the potential hazards of ingesting milk.  We confirm  this latter finding.

[Note: By using “we,” this sentence clarifies the actor and emphasizes the significance of the recent findings reported in this paper. Indeed, “I” and “we” are acceptable in most scientific fields to compare an author’s works with other researchers’ publications. The APA encourages using personal pronouns for this context. The social sciences broaden this scope to allow discussion of personal perspectives, irrespective of comparisons to other literature.]

Other Tips about Using Personal Pronouns

• Avoid starting a sentence with personal pronouns. The beginning of a sentence is a noticeable position that draws readers’ attention. Thus, using personal pronouns as the first one or two words of a sentence will draw unnecessary attention to them (unless, of course, that was your intent).
• Be careful how you define “we.” It should only refer to the authors and never the audience unless your intention is to write a conversational piece rather than a scholarly document! After all, the readers were not involved in analyzing or formulating the conclusions presented in your paper (although, we note that the point of your paper is to persuade readers to reach the same conclusions you did). While this is not a hard-and-fast rule, if you do want to use “we” to refer to a larger class of people, clearly define the term “we” in the sentence. For example, “As researchers, we frequently question…”
• First-person writing is becoming more acceptable under Modern English usage standards; however, the second-person pronoun “you” is still generally unacceptable because it is too casual for academic writing.
• Take all of the above notes with a grain of salt. That is,  double-check your institution or target journal’s author guidelines .  Some organizations may prohibit the use of personal pronouns.
• As an extra tip, before submission, you should always read through the most recent issues of a journal to get a better sense of the editors’ preferred writing styles and conventions.

Wordvice Resources

For more general advice on how to use active and passive voice in research papers, on how to paraphrase , or for a list of useful phrases for academic writing , head over to the Wordvice Academic Resources pages . And for more professional proofreading services , visit our Academic Editing and P aper Editing Services pages.

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Use of Pronouns in Academic Writing

Published by Alvin Nicolas at August 17th, 2021 , Revised On August 24, 2023

Pronouns are words that make reference to both specific and nonspecific things and people. They are used in place of nouns.

First-person pronouns (I, We) are rarely used in academic writing. They are primarily used in a reflective piece, such as a reflective essay or personal statement. You should avoid using second-person pronouns such as “you” and “yours”. The use of third-person pronouns (He, She, They) is allowed, but it is still recommended to consider gender bias when using them in academic writing.

The antecedent of a pronoun is the noun that the pronoun represents. In English, you will see the antecedent appear both before and after the pronoun, even though it is usually mentioned in the text before the pronoun. The students could not complete the work on time because they procrastinated for too long. Before he devoured a big burger, Michael looked a bit nervous.

The Antecedent of a Pronoun

Make sure the antecedent is evident and explicit whenever you use a pronoun in a sentence. You may want to replace the pronoun with the noun to eliminate any vagueness.

• After the production and the car’s mechanical inspection were complete, it was delivered to the owner.

In the above sentence, it is unclear what the pronoun “it” is referring to.

• After the production and the car’s mechanical inspection was complete, the car was delivered to the owner.

Use of First Person Pronouns (I, We) in Academic Writing

The use of first-person pronouns, such as “I” and “We”, is a widely debated topic in academic writing.

While some style guides, such as ‘APA” and “Harvard”, encourage first-person pronouns when describing the author’s actions, many other style guides discourage their use in academic writing to keep the attention to the information presented within rather than who describes it.

Similarly, you will find some leniency towards the use of first-person pronouns in some academic disciplines, while others strictly prohibit using them to maintain an impartial and neutral tone.

It will be fair to say that first-person pronouns are increasingly regular in many forms of academic writing.  If ever in doubt whether or not you should use first-person pronouns in your essay or assignment, speak with your tutor to be entirely sure.

Avoid overusing first-person pronouns in academic papers regardless of the style guide used. It is recommended to use them only where required for improving the clarity of the text.

If you are writing about a situation involving only yourself or if you are the sole author of the paper, then use the singular pronouns (I, my). Use plural pronouns (We, They, Our) when there are coauthors to work.

Avoiding First Person Pronouns

You can avoid first-person pronouns by employing any of the following three methods.

There are advantages and disadvantages of each of these three strategies. For example, passive voice introduces dangling modifiers, which can make your text unclear and ambiguous. Therefore, it would be best to keep first-person pronouns in the text if you can use them.

In some forms of academic writing, such as a personal statement and reflective essay, it is completely acceptable to use first-person pronouns.

The Problem with the Editorial We

Avoid using the first person plural to refer to people in academic text, known as the “editorial we”. The use of the “editorial we” is quite common in newspapers when the author speaks on behalf of the people to express a shared experience or view.

Refrain from using broad generalizations in academic text. You have to be crystal clear and very specific about who you are making reference to. Use nouns in place of pronouns where possible.

• When we tested the data, we found that the hypothesis to be incorrect.
• When the researchers tested the data, they found the hypothesis to be incorrect.
• As we started to work on the project, we realized how complex the requirements were.
• As the students started to work on the project, they realized how complex the requirements were.

If you are talking on behalf of a specific group you belong to, then the use of “we” is acceptable.

• It is essential to be aware of our own
• It is essential for essayists to be aware of their own weaknesses.
• Essayists need to be aware of their own

Use of Second Person Pronouns (You) in Academic Writing

It is strictly prohibited to use the second-person pronoun “you” to address the audience in any form of academic writing. You can rephrase the sentence or introduce the impersonal pronoun “one” to avoid second-person pronouns in the text.

• To achieve the highest academic grade, you must avoid procrastination.
• To achieve the highest academic grade, one must avoid procrastination.
• As you can notice in below Table 2.1, all participants selected the first option.
• As shown in below Table 2.1, all participants selected the first option.

Use of Third Person Pronouns (He, She, They) in Academic Writing

Third-person pronouns in the English language are usually gendered (She/Her, He/Him). Educational institutes worldwide are increasingly advocating for gender-neutral language, so you should avoid using third-person pronouns in academic text.

In the older academic text, you will see gender-based nouns (Fishermen, Traitor) and pronouns (him, her, he, she) being commonly used. However, this style of writing is outdated and warned against in the present times.

You may also see some authors using both masculine and feminine pronouns, such as “he” or “she”, in the same text, but this generally results in unclear and inappropriate sentences.

Considering using gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they”, ‘there”, “them” for unknown people and undetermined people. The use of “they” in academic writing is highly encouraged. Many style guides, including Harvard, MLA, and APA, now endorse gender natural pronouns in academic writing.

On the other hand, you can also choose to avoid using pronouns altogether by either revising the sentence structure or pluralizing the sentence’s subject.

• When a student is asked to write an essay, he can take a specific position on the topic.
• When a student is asked to write an essay, they can take a specific position on the topic.
• When students are asked to write an essay, they are expected to take a specific position on the topic.
• Students are expected to take a specific position on the essay topic.
• The writer submitted his work for approval
• The writer submitted their work for approval.
• The writers submitted their work for approval.
• The writers’ work was submitted for approval.

Make sure it is clear who you are referring to with the singular “they” pronoun. You may want to rewrite the sentence or name the subject directly if the pronoun makes the sentence ambiguous.

For example, in the following example, you can see it is unclear who the plural pronoun “they” is referring to. To avoid confusion, the subject is named directly, and the context approves that “their paper” addresses the writer.

• If the writer doesn’t complete the client’s paper in time, they will be frustrated.
• The client will be frustrated if the writer doesn’t complete their paper in due time.

If you need to make reference to a specific person, it would be better to address them using self-identified pronouns. For example, in the following sentence, you can see that each person is referred to using a different possessive pronoun.

The students described their experience with different academic projects: Mike talked about his essay, James talked about their poster presentation, and Sara talked about her dissertation paper.

Ensure Consistency Throughout the Text

Avoid switching back and forth between first-person pronouns (I, We, Our) and third-person pronouns (The writers, the students) in a single piece. It is vitally important to maintain consistency throughout the text.

For example, The writers completed the work in due time, and our content quality is well above the standard expected. We completed the work in due time, and our content quality is well above the standard expected. The writers completed the work in due time, and the content quality is well above the standard expected.“

How to Use Demonstrative Pronouns (This, That, Those, These) in Academic Writing

Make sure it is clear who you are referring to when using demonstrative pronouns. Consider placing a descriptive word or phrase after the demonstrative pronouns to give more clarity to the sentence.

For example, The political relationship between Israel and Arab states has continued to worsen over the last few decades, contrary to the expectations of enthusiasts in the regional political sphere. This shows that a lot more needs to be done to tackle this.            The political relationship between Israel and Arab states has continued to worsen over the last few decades, contrary to the expectations of enthusiasts in the regional political sphere. This situation shows that a lot more needs to be done to tackle this issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 8 types of pronouns.

The 8 types of pronouns are:

• Personal: Refers to specific persons.
• Demonstrative: Points to specific things.
• Interrogative: Used for questioning.
• Possessive: Shows ownership.
• Reflexive: Reflects the subject.
• Reciprocal: Indicates mutual action.
• Relative: Introduces relative clauses.
• Indefinite: Refers vaguely or generally.

You May Also Like

In general, a “dangling” sentence, phrase, or clause, is one that is not a complete sentence and requires something else to make it complete.

A modifier is a word that changes, clarifies, or limits a particular word in a sentence in order to add details, clarification, importance, or explanation.

Adverbials are words or phrases that are used as an adverb to modify a clause or verb. This article explains the use of adverbials with examples.

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• Published: 02 January 2024

Behavioral consequences of second-person pronouns in written communications between authors and reviewers of scientific papers

• Zhuanlan Sun 1   na1 ,
• C. Clark Cao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4908-9240 2   na1 ,
• Sheng Liu 2   na1 ,
• Yiwei Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5358-9320 2 &
• Chao Ma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0078-6755 3  

Nature Communications volume  15 , Article number:  152 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Human behaviour
• Social sciences

Pronoun usage’s psychological underpinning and behavioral consequence have fascinated researchers, with much research attention paid to second-person pronouns like “you,” “your,” and “yours.” While these pronouns’ effects are understood in many contexts, their role in bilateral, dynamic conversations (especially those outside of close relationships) remains less explored. This research attempts to bridge this gap by examining 25,679 instances of peer review correspondence with Nature Communications using the difference-in-differences method. Here we show that authors addressing reviewers using second-person pronouns receive fewer questions, shorter responses, and more positive feedback. Further analyses suggest that this shift in the review process occurs because “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage creates a more personal and engaging conversation. Employing the peer review process of scientific papers as a backdrop, this research reveals the behavioral and psychological effects that second-person pronouns have in interactive written communications.

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Introduction.

In written communications, one can address the other conversational party using either second-person pronouns or their third-person counterparts. For instance, during the peer review process of a scientific paper, an academic may address the reviewers either using “you” (e.g., “the issue you brought up”) or a third-person reference instead (e.g., “the issue the reviewer brought up…”). Whether this choice matters, however, is less known. This question is embedded within the recent research investigating the behavioral and psychological consequences of personal pronoun usage 1 , 2 , 3 , which in turn falls under the broader research category of the social function of language usage 4 , 5 , 6 . Building upon this growing literature, the present research aims to investigate how the usage of second-person pronouns (“you,” “your,” and “yours”; hereinafter, we use the terms second-person pronoun usage and “you” usage interchangeably) impacts the outcome of written communications.

Currently, a wealth of research has investigated the impact of “you” usage on individuals’ mental state and/or behavior. For instance, “you” can draw the attention of a conversational party and hence evoke higher involvement 7 , 8 , 9 . Moreover, generic “you,” as in “you shall not murder,” signals normative behavior and hence impacts persuasion 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . Furthermore, “you” usage in lyrics like “I will always love you” or movie quotes like “here’s looking at you, kid” can remind one of somebody in their own life (a loved one in these examples) 14 . Despite their important insights, however, most such investigations focus on one-way and one-off communications. While another body of literature does investigate “you” in two-way communications, it is largely limited to close relationships, mainly focusing on how pronoun usage reflects a party’s self- or other-focus 4 , 15 , 16 , 17 . Therefore, the field’s knowledge is still limited about the role of second-person pronouns in bilateral, dynamic, and interactive conversations, especially beyond close relationships.

To bridge this gap, in the present paper, we examine the behavioral and psychological consequences of second-person pronoun usage in interactive, conversational settings. Specifically, by analyzing 25,679 instances of revision correspondence with Nature Communications , we focus on how “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage in authors’ responses to reviewers may influence reviewers’ behavior. This dataset is ideal for our investigation, because the peer review process allows us to compare naturally occurring instances of both “you” and non-“you” responses.

The extant literature has shown that by directly addressing a conversational party, second-person pronouns can evoke the listener’s attention, personal relevance, and involvement in the communication 7 , 14 . Other personal pronouns do not possess this feature. For instance, in stark contrast to “you,” third-person pronouns often function to signal objectivity and minimize the involvement or even the existence of the speaker 18 , 19 , 20 . Building on this literature, we contend that in a communicative setting, addressing the other party as “you” (vs. not as “you”) should be associated with a more personal and engaging conversation, in contrast to an impersonal, businesslike exchange.

This feature of “you” usage may, in turn, lead to observable behavioral patterns in peer review outcomes. First, the personal and engaging conversational tone stimulated by “you” usage may in and of itself make the reviewer like the responses more, as individuals tend to favor things that are personally relevant 8 , 14 . Second, communicative norms that govern such conversations may call for greater politeness, civility, and embarrassment avoidance (“face-saving”) in communications 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , making the comments more favorable (or less harsh) than they otherwise would be and resulting in greater positivity and fewer questions in reviewer comments.

Building on this perspective, here we show that when the authors use (vs. do not use) second-person pronouns to address the reviewers, they also see less lengthy reviewer comments, encounter fewer questions, and receive more positive and less negative feedback. We further link this shift in the review process to a more personal and engaging conversation prompted by “you” usage: First, when authors address reviewers using “you,” the reviewer responses tend to include fewer first-person singular pronouns, suggesting decreased self-focus 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 ; and to use less complex words, a staple feature of in-person conversation 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 . Second, thematic analyses conducted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) show that second-person pronouns are indeed associated with increased reviewer engagement in their comments. Core findings from our dataset are also causally supported by a pre-registered behavioral experiment ( N  = 1601). Specifically, when participants assuming the role of reviewers are addressed in second person (vs. third person), they evaluate an otherwise identical author response as more positive. This effect is mediated by the extent to which the conversation is perceived as personal and engaging. Taken together, this research investigates the behavioral consequence and psychological underpinning of second-person pronoun usage employing field and lab data. In so doing, we contribute to the literature on language usage (and pronoun usage in particular) and shed light on the collegiate understanding of the peer review process and science of science in general.

Data and design

We analyzed revision correspondence of all papers published in Nature Communications between April 2016 (when the journal first began publishing reviewer reports) and April 2021. This dataset contains 13,359 published papers that account for a total of 29,144 rounds of review. In the present research, a “round” of review is defined as one exchange between the editorial/reviewer team (hereinafter simply “reviewers”) and the authors, with the reviewer comments being followed by the author responses. For instance, the “1st round of review” begins with the initial comments from the reviewers and the authors’ responses to those comments, the 2nd round of review consists of the next batch of reviewer comments and the authors’ responses to them, and so on. In our analysis, we focus on the authors’ usage of second-person pronouns in addressing the reviewer team in the first review-response-review process (i.e., reviewer comments in the 1st round, author responses in the 1st round, and reviewer comments in the 2nd round). We focus on this process because it constitutes most of our observations (25,679, or 88.11% of 29,144 review rounds) and, more importantly, affords a difference-in-differences (DID) design, which we elaborate below. Figure  1 illustrates our focal data and study design (full details regarding the number of papers and rounds of review can be found in Supplementary Note  1 ).

The treatment group and control group are defined by whether the authors responded to reviewers’ comments using second-person pronouns in the 1st round of review (i.e., between the 1st and 2nd round reviewer comments).

In examining the impact of “you” usage, it is important to consider some distinctive features of the peer review process. As an illustration, Fig.  2 shows the authors’ response to the reviewers in the 1st round of review (marked by the vertical dashed line), as well as the number of questions reviewers posed before and after this response (i.e., question counts in the 1st and 2nd review rounds). We then compare question counts following both “you” and non-“you” usage in a quasi-experimental fashion. Specifically, we categorize a paper into the treatment group if its authors used “you” in their 1st-round responses (which, in our context, can be considered as the treatment administered to reviewers), and the control group if they did not. Note that the treatment and control groups here are not in the strict experimental sense, as the papers are not randomly assigned to them.

Numbers herein represent mean values in the raw data and are not adjusted for any control variables or fixed effects. Supplementary Fig.  1 illustrates the distribution of the number of questions (and of words) across four scenarios as yielded by the (author “you” usage: yes vs. no) x 2 (round of review: before vs. after author response) DID design. We also direct interested readers to Supplementary Note  2 for further insights into data patterns related to “you” usage.

Importantly, as illustrated in Fig.  2 , to estimate the effect of “you” usage, it could be misleading to simply contrast the number of questions reviewers raised after the author responses with “you” (5.82) and without (4.25). This is because empirically, the treatment and control groups may begin with different question counts (which happens to be the case in our data—29.87 and 24.30, respectively, as per Fig.  2 ). To offset this initial discrepancy, we instead measure the decline in question count from the 1st to the 2nd round. Specifically, authors who used “you” saw a decrease of 24.05 questions in the subsequent round, while those who did not use “you” saw a decrease of 20.05.

Here, the control group reduction of 20.05 questions reflects a “natural” progression in our data, such that question count dwindles as the review process progresses, regardless of whether the author used “you” (see Fig.  2 ). On the other hand, the treatment group reduction of 24.05 also encompasses our focal effect of “you” usage, in addition to the overall trend. Therefore, the difference between the two reductions provides a relatively precise estimation of the effect of “you” usage. Specifically, compared to the control group, the treatment group experienced a steeper decline in question counts (by a margin of 4).

This approach to estimating the effect of “you” usage constitutes a DID framework, a quasi-experimental method widely used in observational data analysis. Specifically, the first “differences” here are the differences in question counts before and after author response, within both the treatment and control groups. These differences serve to offset initial discrepancies between the groups. The second “difference” then contrasts these two differences to estimate the effect of “you” usage—hence the name “difference-in-differences.”

As depicted in Fig.  1 , during the 1st round of review, authors of 5042 papers (37.74% of all 13,359 papers) used “you” in their responses to the reviewer comments (i.e., treatment group), whereas authors of 8317 (62.26%) papers did not use “you” (i.e., the control group). We then estimate the effect of “you” on various behavioral and psychological outcomes by comparing the average change in such outcomes before and after a response with “you” versus without “you”. In what follows, this DID model enables us to examine more closely the effect of “you” usage on total number of questions from the reviewers, total length of reviewer comments, and positivity/negativity of the 2nd-round reviewer comments.

In addition, we also employ this DID model to examine the impact of “you” usage on how personal and engaging the reviewer-author communication is. Measurements of interest include the subjectivity of the language used in the reviewer comments, the frequency of reviewers’ use of first-person pronouns, the complexity of the vocabulary used by the reviewers, and the extent to which the reviewers engage with the authors.

Equation ( 2 ) in the Methods section formulates the DID model summarized above. To ensure the robustness of our analysis, a variety of control variables are also included in this model. The summary statistics of our dependent and control variables are presented in Table  1 .

Reviewers wrote less and asked fewer questions following authors’ “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage

Table  2 summarizes the DID estimates on two review outcomes: the total number of questions the reviewer raised, and the total number of words the reviewer wrote. The first non-header row is of particular interest, as it reports the DID estimator, or the effect of the interaction between “you” usage and time (i.e., before vs. after the author’s response).

In Column (1), the significant, negative coefficient (−4.0019) indicates that “you” usage has a negative effect on the total number of questions the reviewer asked. Specifically, when exposed to “you” (vs. non-“you”) author response in the 1st round of review, reviewers raised fewer questions in the 2nd round ( t (25675) = −10.01, p  < 0.001, B = −4.00, 95% CI = [−4.79, −3.22]). This result remains robust when the control variables (see Table  1 ) and paper fixed effects are included in the DID model (“you” usage sees 3.34 fewer questions; t (12319) = −9.40, p  < 0.001, B = −3.34, 95% CI = [−4.03, −2.64]; Column (2)). Similarly, reviewers addressed by “you” (vs. non-“you”) language also wrote 172.15 fewer words as estimated by the basic DID model ( t (25675) = −9.54, p  < 0.001, B = −172.15, 95% CI = [−207.50, −136.79]; Column (3)), or 135.59 fewer words when the control variables and paper fixed effects are included ( t (12319) = −9.36, p  < 0.001, B = −135.59, 95% CI = [−163.98, −107.20]; Column (4)).

Reviewer Comments Are More Positive (and Less Negative) Following Authors’ “You” (vs. Non-“You”) Usage

In addition, we find that authors using “you” also receive more positive (and less negative) reviewer comments during the review process. To assess positivity in a reliable and robust manner, we employed multiple widely-adopted automated text analysis techniques to analyze the reviewer comments (see Sentiments of Reviewers’ Comments in the Methods section for more details on these measurements).

Table  3 summarizes the corresponding DID estimates, with control variables and paper fixed effects included. Columns (1) and (2) reflect the positivity of reviewer comments employing the Python package TextBlob and R package sentimentr, respectively. Columns (3) and (4), on the other hand, assess the negativity of reviewer comments employing the Python package NLTK and a hand-coded lexicon of common negative words, respectively. As indicated in the first non-header row of Table  3 , the findings are consistent across all measurements of review positivity/negativity, such that authors’ use of “you” in the 1st round is significantly associated with increased positivity and decreased negativity of the reviewer comments in the 2nd round.

To further validate these findings, we conducted six additional robustness checks, the detailed results of which are reported in the Supplementary Information for succinctness. To briefly summarize: First, we demonstrate that more “you” usage is associated with a stronger effect on the variables above (Supplementary Note  4 and Supplementary Table  3 ). Second, to construct a cleaner treatment group, we included a paper in the treatment group only when its “you” usage is conversational (as opposed to courteous; e.g., “thank you”). Of all 5042 “you” papers, 1847 (36.63%) contain only courteous “you,” and are thus excluded from analysis during this robustness check (Supplementary Note  4 and Supplementary Table  4 ). Third, to construct a cleaner control group, we only included a paper in the control condition if it explicitly addresses the reviewer in third person (e.g., “the reviewer”; Supplementary Note  4 and Supplementary Table  5 ). Fourth, we employed a matching technique (propensity score matching, PSM) to obtain matched treatment and control groups with comparable observable characteristics (Supplementary Note  4 ; Supplementary Tables  6 , 7 ; Supplementary Fig.  3 ). Fifth, we employed a two-stage Heckman model (Supplementary Note  4 ; Supplementary Tables  8 , 9 ) to capture authors’ “you” usage in response to the initial use of “you” by reviewers. In doing so, we allow for a more reciprocal, dynamic view of the impact of “you.” Sixth, to further account for the non-randomness in “you” usage, we employed placebo (non-parametric permutation) tests to validate that our DID findings are not spurious (Supplementary Note  4 and Supplementary Fig.  4 ). Our results remain robust to all these robust checks.

More personal and engaging conversation following “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage: “I” usage, word complexity, and reviewer engagement

Thus far, we have demonstrated that addressing reviewers as “you” is associated with fewer questions and less writing from the reviewers, as well as more positive and less negative reviewer comments. In postulating the underlying mechanism of the effect, we contend that addressing the other party in second person is also associated with a more personal and engaging conversation, which is in turn responsible for these marked effects on the review process. Below, we examine several potential indicators of personal and engaging conversations to test this hypothesis employing the same DID model.

A potential indicator is the subjectivity of reviewer comments—the extent to which comments reflect personal opinions rather than factual information 33 . High subjectivity in language indicates that the text or utterance is more opinionated and personal (as opposed to factual and unbiased) in nature. The usage of subjective languages is a marked feature of interpersonal conversations 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 . We assess language subjectivity using the Python package TextBlob 38 (see Supplementary Note  5 for method details, and Supplementary Fig.  5 for the most frequently used words in our data indicating subjectivity). However, our prediction that authors’ “you” usage is associated with increased subjectivity in reviewer responses does not reach the 0.05 level of significance (see Column (1) in Table  4 ).

One evidence of a more personal and engaging conversation involves first-person pronoun usage. In our data, authors’ “you” usage is associated with reviewers’ decreased usage of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., “I,” “me,” “my”; see Column (2) in Table  4 ), which can indicate self-focused attention 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 . On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference for first-person plural pronouns (i.e., “we,” “us,” “our”), which often indicate a communal focus 39 (Supplementary Note  6 and Supplementary Table  12 ). This result suggests that following authors’ “you” usage, reviewer may show less self-focus, hence making fewer “I” statements.

Additional evidence of a more personal conversation is found in word complexity. A reviewer comment is more complex if the words in it contain more syllables on average. We find that authors’ second-person pronoun usage is associated with decreased word complexity in reviewer comments (see Column (3) in Table  4 ). This result suggests that the reviewers, when addressed using second-person pronouns, favored more plain, readable language over complex and formal written language, a choice often made to facilitate a conversation 29 , 30 , 31 , 40 , 41 .

Yet more evidence of personal, engaging conversation is found by employing the text mining technology Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which identifies the hidden topics in reviewer comments that may potentially indicate reviewers’ engagement with the authors. R package topicmodels was applied on reviewer comments of 1st and 2nd round, and revealed 40 hidden topics at optimal best model fit (see Supplementary Note  7 and Supplementary Fig.  6 ). Here, we focus on one topic (topic 11) that consists of numerous words reflecting communication and engagement during the review process (Fig.  3 ). All 40 identified topics and their top 10 marker words are displayed in Supplementary Note  7 and Supplementary Fig.  7 . The distribution of document-level topic proportions within the chosen topic (i.e., reviewer engagement) is presented in Supplementary Note  7 and Supplementary Fig.  8 .

Clustered into the engagement topic are words such as “address,” “revise,” “concern,” and so on.

We measure the engagement level of a review comment by the frequency of words associated with the identified engagement topic. This frequency is equal to the probability of a review containing the engagement topic, multiplied by the total word count of said review. We find that the topic of engagement appears significantly more frequently in reviewer comments if “you” was used (vs. not used) by the authors. This result again suggests that the use of “you” may have triggered greater engagement in the subject matter of the paper (see Column (4) in Table  4 ). We further experimented with alternative LDA models with 35 and 45 topics, as well as the use of a subset of “high-engagement” words (e.g., “exciting,” “interesting,” and “enjoy”; see all 116 words in Supplementary Note  8 and Supplementary Table  15 ) and the adoption of a structural topic model 42 , 43 . In all alternative models, we obtain results consistent with our predictions (see Supplementary Note  7 and Supplementary Table  13 ). However, no statistically significant difference was observed between the treatment and control groups when the selected topic of reviewer engagement was replaced with other, unrelated topics (see Supplementary Note  7 and Supplementary Table  14 ).

Effect of the usage of second-person pronouns by the reviewers on engagement measurements

If an author’s “you” usage can render conversations more personal and engaging, it follows that this effect should grow even stronger when both parties employ “you” to address each other. In this section, we examine how both parties’ “you” usage jointly impacts indicators of a personal and engaging conversation. This addition of reviewer usage of “you” into our analyses yields a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) model. This DDD model is best viewed as splitting our original DID model into two separate yet comparable DIDs: one with reviewers who used “you” in the 1st round and the other without. This design thus allows us to examine the impact of reviewers’ “you” usage by contrasting the two separate DID models. Indeed, as demonstrated in Supplementary Note  9 , Supplementary Tables  16 , 17 , we find that when the reviewer initiates a “you” (vs. non-“you”) conversation in the first place, most of our DID (save for subjectivity) yields a larger effect size. In other words, the effect of “you” usage is the most evident when both parties use “you” language. Table  5 formally compares the effects of the two DIDs, forming a third differential impact based on reviewers’ initial “you” usage. The spirit of our analysis echoes that of Kenny and colleagues’ seminal work on dyadic data analysis, which factors the role of both parties into the analysis 44 , 45 .

Recall that author’s usage of “you” is sufficient to elicit significant behavioral consequences (i.e., question numbers, word counts, positivity, negativity), irrespective of whether the reviewer used “you” first or not (refer to Supplementary Note  9 ; Supplementary Tables  18 , 19 ). What we attempt to demonstrate here is the amplifying effect of mutual “you” usage on our mechanism—that is, creating a personal, engaging conversation.

Note that although the focus of this research lies in authors’ “you” usage, our DDD model, together with the previously discussed Heckman Model, affords a reciprocal perspective into how reviewers’ “you” usage also impacts the author. Specifically, reviewers’ “you” usage can not only stimulate authors’ “you” usage (Heckman Model) but also strengthen the contribution of “you” usage to boosted engagement (DDD). Also note that our DDD analysis can also cascade into the remaining rounds, and we direct interested readers to Supplementary Note  2 for more information.

Additionally, we report DDD results for number of questions, number of words, positivity, and negativity in Supplementary Tables  18 , 19 . Although the DID effect sizes are generally larger when reviewers used “you” in the 1st round, these DDD results are not statistically significant.

Behavioral experiment

The above analyses provide converging evidence that “you” usage is associated with more personal and engaging communication. However, secondary data have a limited capacity for establishing psychological mechanisms and, crucially, causality. To address this, we conducted a controlled, pre-registered ( https://aspredicted.org/9yw2f.pdf ) experiment to supplement our field data. In this study, 1601 participants were asked to play the role of reviewers and evaluate an author’s response. Of all participants, 901 (56.3%) self-identified as female, 676 (42.2%) as male, and 24 (1.5%) as non-binary or chose not to disclose their gender; M age  = 41.9 years.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, in which they were addressed by the author using either “you” or non-“you” language. Participants then responded to a battery of questions regarding the author’s response. Detailed design and procedures are outlined in the Methods section. Key findings are summarized below, while secondary analyses are available in Supplementary Method  1 .

First, an ANOVA reveals that participants addressed with “you” rated the author’s response more positively ( M  = 5.77, SD = 0.98) than did those who were not (M = 5.61, SD = 1.01; F (1, 1599) = 10.62, p  = 0.001, Cohen’s d  = 0.16, 95% CI = [0.06, 0.26]). Furthermore, “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage also led participants to perceive their exchange with the author as more personal and engaging ( M  = 5.13, SD = 1.10 vs. M  = 4.76, SD = 1.24; F (1, 1599) = 40.78, p  < 0.001, Cohen’s d  = 0.32, 95% CI = [0.22, 0.42]). Figure  4 illustrates these findings.

a Participants addressed with “you” (vs. non-“you”) rated the author’s response more positively. b Participants addressed with “you” (vs. non-“you”) found their conversation with the author more personal and engaging. Individual data points are shown using overlaid dot plots. Error bar shows ±1 SE.

Second, a mediation analysis shows that the relationship between “you” usage and positivity is fully mediated by participants’ perception of an personal and engaging communication (unstandardized indirect effect = 0.19, SE = 0.03, 95% CI = [0.14, 0.26]; 5000 bootstrap resamples).

Taken together, “you” usage indeed makes the reviewer–author communication more personal and engaging, which in turn leads to more positive reviewer comments. To further validate these results, we also replicated the main effects and the mediation effect above in a separate sample ( N  = 1200) employing the same experimental design. In this second experiment, we also find that these findings cannot be attributed to alternative processes such as contention, personal connection, or obligation. Refer to Supplementary Method  2 for detailed results.

This work examines the correspondence in the peer review process and finds that when author responses use (vs. do not use) second-person pronouns (e.g., “you”), reviewers ask fewer questions, provide briefer responses, and offer more positive and fewer negative comments. Both lab and field evidence converge to demonstrate that this is the case because “you” (vs. non-“you”) usage fosters a more personal and engaging conversation.

An apparent practical implication of this work is, of course, that authors of academic papers can employ second-person pronouns strategically during the review process to their benefit. However, we believe that our findings extend beyond academic contexts and could be relevant for other forms of (formal) written communication. For example, businesses might utilize “you” in their marketing materials to nudge consumer attitude; likewise, professionals or politicians could use “you” to foster greater engagement. While the effectiveness of these applications requires further empirical validation, the real-world implications of our findings prove both intriguing and potentially impactful.

Conceptually, our study first contributes to the broad literature on language usage, particularly pronoun usage. Researchers have long known that nuances in language use matter. For example, the presence or absence of future tense in a language affects its users’ future orientation 6 , and word choice can signal political stance 46 . Within this field, pronoun usage has fascinated theorists for decades, as it can reflect individuals’ mental states such as narcissism 27 or lead to various mental processes or behaviors (such as introducing independence/interdependence self-construal) 47 , 48 . Recent technological advancements have significantly fueled research on pronoun usage, enabling the collection of large amounts of data from various online platforms 49 , 50 , 51 .

With respect to second-person pronouns, while their usage has been studied in unidirectional, one-off communication 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , understanding “you” usage in dynamic, bilateral, reciprocal contexts remains critical. Thus far, important work has explored the bilateral usage of “you” in close relationships 4 , 15 , 16 , 17 . Additionally, methods like the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model have further enriched our understanding of communications between comparable parties 44 , 45 . Nonetheless, current insights into mutual “you” usage are mostly confined to close relationships whose parties are of relative equal stations. Hence, there remains a need to explore more diverse contexts such as familial, professional, or adversarial communications, particularly those between unequal parties like superiors and subordinates, professors and students, or, in our case, reviewers and authors. Extant work has shown, for instance, that high-power individuals tend to use “I” less often, instead favoring more “we” and “you” usage 52 . In a similar vein, our study enriches our understanding of “you” usage in two-way communications that are both professional and hierarchical.

Moreover, by revealing the link between language and review outcomes, we contribute to the emerging field of science of science, which scientifically probes the practice of science itself 53 , 54 . Regarding the peer review process, several often-overlapping science of science sub-fields, such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, and metascience, have accumulated important insights into how scientific publication works, what potential biases exist, and how to ensure rigorous, transparent outcomes 55 , 56 , 57 . Through the present work, we underscore that perspectives and methods of language study can bear promising fruit in science of science, and we contribute to the few extant works that have already begun to explore this front (finding, e.g., that scientific papers often use generic, overgeneralized language that signals impact at the cost of precision) 5 .

Several limitations in our data should be noted. To begin, the lack of pre-1st-round reviewer comments prevents direct verification of the parallel trend assumption for DID analysis. As a result, the randomness of “you” and non-“you” usage poses a limitation in our data (we have, however, employed such methods to address this issue as PSM, Heckman model, permutation test, and behavioral experiment). Moreover, our dataset comprises only papers eventually published, leading to potential selection biases due to the absence of review reports from rejected submissions or those authors opted not to pursue. Additionally, since publishing review correspondence in Nature Communications was optional before November 2022, our data (April 2016 to April 2021) only include authors who opted for publication. These limitations could hinder our ability to analyze “you” usage in, say, more conflictual communications, despite its well-established potential to convey confrontation (e.g., challenging, blaming, or finger-pointing) 2 , 16 , 17 , 58 . Likewise, selection biases in our data also prevent us from comparing “you” usage in accepted versus rejected manuscripts, or between authors who did versus did not choose to publish their review records. Thus, we encourage future research to explore diverse datasets to expand on our findings.

Furthermore, in this study, we interpret the decreased “I” usage by reviewers following authors’ “you” usage as indicative of a reduction of self-focused attention. However, we recognize the complexities around this inference 59 , as “I” language may also signify language concreteness 1 and self-disclosure 15 , contributing to a more personal conversation. While this alternative account is unlikely to contradict our findings due to extensive triangulation, we nevertheless call on future research to delve deeper into first-person usage in written communication.

This research is approved by the Office of Research and Knowledge Transfer at Lingnan University and complies with all pertinent ethical regulations.

Peer review data

We sourced peer review data for all papers from April 2016 to April 2021 directly from Nature Communications . Each paper’s Supplementary Information section typically hosts its peer review file, which we downloaded using a custom Python (v3.7) script. These files, originally in PDF format, include both reviewer comments and author responses. To create a paper-level peer review dataset, we first separated reviewer comments from author responses for every review round and created separate TXT files for both. We then generated the variables used in our analysis for each paper by review round employing text mining techniques.

To construct the panel data for studying our proposed effects, we employed several automated text analysis techniques to generate desired variables. Specifically, we leveraged Python packages such as TextBlob and NLTK, as well as R packages including sentiments and topicmodels. These methods are well-established in the fields of natural language processing and computer science and are widely adopted in social science studies.

Sentiments of reviewers’ comments

We generated the following four sentiment metrics for reviewer comments. Two of these capture positivity, while the other two capture negativity.

Python-based positivity

Positivity is also known as “polarity” in Python and calculated by the TextBlob Python package. TextBlob calculates how positive a reviewer comment is on a scale ranging from −1.0 (highly negative) to 1.0 (highly positive). This calculation is enabled by TextBlob’s built-in lexicon, which contains a collection of words and their part-of-speech meanings.

R-based positivity

Using the sentimentr package in R, we gained an alternate metric of review positivity, which is also gauged on a −1.0 (highly negative) to 1.0 (highly positive) scale.

Python-based negativity

Utilizing Python’s NLTK package, we derived the negativity of a review. This approach leverages the VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner) sentiment analyzer to evaluate each review’s negative emotion scores on a 0 (not negative at all) to 1 (very negative) scale.

Manually coded negativity

Following Delgado et al. 60 , we incorporated the 30 negative words most frequently employed by our sampled reviewers. We also introduced other negative words that recurrently appeared in our dataset, resulting in a compilation of 92 negative terms. To measure negativity, we determined the occurrence rate of these negative words (scaled by dividing by 100). The scale thus starts at 0 (not negative at all) and increases by 0.01 (or 1%) each time one of the 92 negative words is used.

Indicators of personal and engaging conversations

The following four variables serve as indicators of a personal and engaging conversations:

Subjectivity

Assessed using the TextBlob Python package, again using its built-in lexicon. This measure scales from 0 (very objective) to 1 (very subjective). For illustrative examples of varying subjectivity in reviewer comments, see Supplementary Note  5 and Supplementary Table  10 .

First-person singular pronoun usage

Quantified by counting occurrences of terms like “I,” “me,” “my,” and “mine” within a reviewer report.

Word complexity

Captured by the average number of syllables per word in a peer review report. More syllables per word indicates a more complex vocabulary. For examples of complex and simple words, refer to Supplementary Note  5 and Supplementary Table  11 .

Reviewer engagement

Deduced from the proportion of the “engagement topic” in a reviewer report. This proportion is obtained by employing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, a well-established method in natural language processing that uncovers latent topics within a collection of texts.

In our context, the texts in question are the reviewer reports. The LDA model assumes that each report comprises several topics (with the combined probability of all topics being 1) and that every topic is a discrete probability distribution over all words. By implementing the LDA model with a predetermined number of topics, document–topic and topic–word pairs can be formed based on the words included in each reviewer report, allowing us to identify latent topics.

To implement the LDA model, we followed a data preprocessing approach similar to those used in recent studies 61 . Initial steps involved the removal of stop words (e.g., “and,” “or”), numbers, and punctuation. We also use stemmed and lower-case words for consistency. We then employed the R package topicmodels to assess the model performance and estimate an appropriate number of topics. Specifically, after experimenting with topic counts ranging from 10 to 100 (at 10-topic intervals), we determined 40 to be the optimal number in that it has the lowest perplexity score. With topic number set to 40, the engagement level was subsequently formulated as:

where % of engagement topic is the probability or proportion of the engagement-related topic in the review text calculated by the LDA analysis. Number of words in the reviewer report is the total word count in each review text.

We employ the difference-in-differences (DID) model to identify the impact of second-person pronouns on various outcome variables of interest. Specifically, we estimate the following model:

Where \({y}_{{it}}\) represents the outcome variable of paper i in round t . Response_with_you it denotes whether the author(s) of a paper responded with “you”, taking the value of 1 if the response includes “you” and 0 otherwise. After_response it denotes whether the observation period is after the response, taking the value of 1 if so and 0 otherwise. X it is a vector of controlling variables of a paper, including (1) the number of pages 62 ; (2) the number of references 63 ; (3) the title length; (4) the number of authors 64 ; (5) H-index of the first author 65 ; (6) the gender of the first author 61 ; (7) the last initial of the first author 66 ; (8) the positivity of authors in the 1 st round of review; (9) the friendliness of authors in the 1st round of review; (10) the positivity of reviewers in the 1st round of review; (11) the month the paper was published 67 ; (12) the year the paper was published 67 ; and (13) the discipline to which the paper belongs ( Nature Communications identifies five disciplines: biological sciences, physical sciences, health sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and scientific community and society). \({\delta }_{i}\) is the paper fixed effects, controlling for the potentially unobserved paper-level factors. \({\varepsilon }_{{it}}\) is a random error term. The coefficient β 1 is our coefficient of interest, examining the differential effects of responses with and without “you” (on various outcomes) before and after the response. We find that the residuals for DID models approximate a normal distribution, and the variance of the residuals is stable across different levels of the independent variables, as exemplified in Supplementary Fig.  9 .

Pre-registration

The behavioral experiment was pre-registered on April 28, 2023 (Pacific Time) with AsPredicted ( https://aspredicted.org/9yw2f.pdf ). Here, we disclose a total of two deviations from the pre-registration protocol. First, the reported mediation analysis was not originally included in the protocol and was added in response to a review comment. Second, the actual sample size exceeded the pre-registered target by one participant, as explained below.

Participants

We recruited 1601 Amazon Mechanical Turk panelists via the CloudResearch platform, who participated in the study for monetary compensation. No statistical method was used to predetermine sample size. All participants provided informed consent before participating in the study.

The pre-registered target sample size was 1600. However, due to CloudResearch’s process for determining sample size, which is outside our control, the study eventually yielded 1601 participants. This deviation was anticipated and noted in our pre-registration.

The participant gender distribution is as follows: Of all 1601 participants, 901 (56.3%) self-identified as female, 676 (42.2%) as male, and 24 (1.5%) as non-binary or chose not to disclose their gender. While we did not plan for a priori gender-based analysis, we have included the results of post hoc analyses in Supplementary Method  1 , in compliance with the editorial policies of the Nature Portfolio (as of November 12, 2023).

Data exclusion

Our pre-registration dictates that data would be excluded from analysis if flagged as fraudulent by Qualtrics, the survey platform used for our study. However, Qualtrics’ Expert Review function did not detect any fraud that would warrant data exclusion. Consequently, no data were excluded from the analyses.

After providing informed consent, all participants were asked to read a brief introduction to the peer review process. The introduction read “Peer review is a process all academics need to go through if they want to get their research work published. When a researcher submits a research paper to an academic journal, the paper is subject to an independent assessment by other field experts called the reviewers (whose role we ask you to play here).”

All participants were then asked to imagine that they had recently reviewed a manuscript for an academic journal. To provide sufficient realism, this hypothetical manuscript was very loosely adapted from a 2020 paper published in Nature Communications 68 , selected due to its subject matter being easily understandable for laypersons. Specifically, participants were told that “This work examines the possibility that people with more emotional experience (joy, anger, distress, etc.) also have richer emotional vocabulary (i.e., words describing states of emotions) in their language usage.”

All participants were then instructed to imagine that after reviewing the manuscript, they wrote the following comments to the author of the paper:

Overall, the paper presents an interesting theory and is well-written.

The studies included in the paper are well designed and the interpretation of data is generally convincing.

That being said, detailed criteria on what counts as “emotional vocabulary” are lacking. For instance, the usage of such words as “alone” or “bad” does not necessarily carry emotional connotations. As a result, the inclusion of such words in data analysis may prove problematic.

The contribution of the work is insufficiently elaborated. To this end, the paper needs to better explain why this work helps advance what the field already knows.

Note that no “you” language was presented in these comments.

All participants were then informed that they had now received the author’s responses. The responses were otherwise identical, save for how the participants (i.e., the reviewers) were addressed. By this design, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions (i.e., “you” and non-“you”). Specifically, participants in the “you” [non-“you”] condition read:

We appreciate your [the reviewer’s] comments, which we find very useful. With regard to the questions you [the reviewer] raised:

You [The reviewer] advised us to provide details on how emotional vocabulary is determined. Building on your [the reviewer’s] advice, we now include a thorough discussion of your [the reviewer’s] concern over this issue, and lay out the selection procedure of those words in the manuscript.

In this discussion, we also address your [the reviewer’s] concern that some words are not applied solely to emotional experience.

You [The reviewer] suggested that the contribution of this work be differentiated from existing research. Following your [the reviewer’s] suggestion, we explain how this work advances the understanding of emotions and affective language.

As per your [the reviewer’s] recommendation, in this revision we also further elaborate the contribution of this work in the discussion section.

The participants were unaware of their assigned condition and were not cognizant of the existence of the alternate condition to which they were not assigned. The investigators, on the other hand, were not blinded to allocation during experiments and outcome assessment.

Participants were then prompted to evaluate the how personal and engaging they found the conversation to be on a 4-item, 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree; Cronbach’s α = 0.86): “In general, I find the conversation between the parties engaging,” “The author is engaging in a personal conversation with me,” “The correspondence between the reviewer and the author feels conversational,” and “I find the author personable.” Participants also rated the positivity of the author’s response on a single-item Likert scale “My overall impression of the author’s response is positive.”

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

All data necessary for reproducing the results presented in this paper have been deposited in OSF ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XWYS4 ) 69 .

Code availability

All code necessary to reproduce our analyses are available at OSF ( https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XWYS4 ) 69 .

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Acknowledgements

C.C. is supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (13501722) and the Lam Woo Research Fund (F871223) at Lingnan University. Y.L. is supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (13503323), the Lam Woo Research Fund (LWP20020) and Faculty Research Grant (DB23A5) at Lingnan University, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72271060). C.M. is supported by the General Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (72074045).

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High-Quality Development Evaluation Institute, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China

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School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

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C.M., Y.L., Z.S. and C.C. designed research; Z.S., C.C., Y.L. and C.M. performed research; Z.S., C.C. and S.L. collected and analyzed data; and Z.S., C.C. and Y.L. wrote the paper. All authors wrote, edited, and revised the manuscript.

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Sun, Z., Cao, C.C., Liu, S. et al. Behavioral consequences of second-person pronouns in written communications between authors and reviewers of scientific papers. Nat Commun 15 , 152 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44515-1

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• Writing Tips

Can You Use I or We in a Research Paper?

4-minute read

• 11th July 2023

Writing in the first person, or using I and we pronouns, has traditionally been frowned upon in academic writing . But despite this long-standing norm, writing in the first person isn’t actually prohibited. In fact, it’s becoming more acceptable – even in research papers.

 If you’re wondering whether you can use I (or we ) in your research paper, you should check with your institution first and foremost. Many schools have rules regarding first-person use. If it’s up to you, though, we still recommend some guidelines. Check out our tips below!

When Is It Most Acceptable to Write in the First Person?

Certain sections of your paper are more conducive to writing in the first person. Typically, the first person makes sense in the abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion sections. You should still limit your use of I and we , though, or your essay may start to sound like a personal narrative .

 Using first-person pronouns is most useful and acceptable in the following circumstances.

When doing so removes the passive voice and adds flow

Sometimes, writers have to bend over backward just to avoid using the first person, often producing clunky sentences and a lot of passive voice constructions. The first person can remedy this. For example: 

Both sentences are fine, but the second one flows better and is easier to read.

When doing so differentiates between your research and other literature

When discussing literature from other researchers and authors, you might be comparing it with your own findings or hypotheses . Using the first person can help clarify that you are engaging in such a comparison. For example: 

 In the first sentence, using “the author” to avoid the first person creates ambiguity. The second sentence prevents misinterpretation.

When doing so allows you to express your interest in the subject

In some instances, you may need to provide background for why you’re researching your topic. This information may include your personal interest in or experience with the subject, both of which are easier to express using first-person pronouns. For example:

Expressing personal experiences and viewpoints isn’t always a good idea in research papers. When it’s appropriate to do so, though, just make sure you don’t overuse the first person.

When to Avoid Writing in the First Person

It’s usually a good idea to stick to the third person in the methods and results sections of your research paper. Additionally, be careful not to use the first person when:

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●  It makes your findings seem like personal observations rather than factual results.

●  It removes objectivity and implies that the writing may be biased .

●  It appears in phrases such as I think or I believe , which can weaken your writing.

Keeping Your Writing Formal and Objective

Using the first person while maintaining a formal tone can be tricky, but keeping a few tips in mind can help you strike a balance. The important thing is to make sure the tone isn’t too conversational.

 To achieve this, avoid referring to the readers, such as with the second-person you . Use we and us only when referring to yourself and the other authors/researchers involved in the paper, not the audience.

It’s becoming more acceptable in the academic world to use first-person pronouns such as we and I in research papers. But make sure you check with your instructor or institution first because they may have strict rules regarding this practice.

 If you do decide to use the first person, make sure you do so effectively by following the tips we’ve laid out in this guide. And once you’ve written a draft, send us a copy! Our expert proofreaders and editors will be happy to check your grammar, spelling, word choice, references, tone, and more. Submit a 500-word sample today!

Is it ever acceptable to use I or we in a research paper?

In some instances, using first-person pronouns can help you to establish credibility, add clarity, and make the writing easier to read.

How can I avoid using I in my writing?

Writing in the passive voice can help you to avoid using the first person.

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We Vs. They: Using the First & Third Person in Research Papers

Writing in the first , second , or third person is referred to as the author’s point of view . When we write, our tendency is to personalize the text by writing in the first person . That is, we use pronouns such as “I” and “we”. This is acceptable when writing personal information, a journal, or a book. However, it is not common in academic writing.

Some writers find the use of first , second , or third person point of view a bit confusing while writing research papers. Since second person is avoided while writing in academic or scientific papers, the main confusion remains within first or third person.

In the following sections, we will discuss the usage and examples of the first , second , and third person point of view.

First Person Pronouns

The first person point of view simply means that we use the pronouns that refer to ourselves in the text. These are as follows:

Can we use I or We In the Scientific Paper?

Using these, we present the information based on what “we” found. In science and mathematics, this point of view is rarely used. It is often considered to be somewhat self-serving and arrogant . It is important to remember that when writing your research results, the focus of the communication is the research and not the persons who conducted the research. When you want to persuade the reader, it is best to avoid personal pronouns in academic writing even when it is personal opinion from the authors of the study. In addition to sounding somewhat arrogant, the strength of your findings might be underestimated.

For example:

Based on my results, I concluded that A and B did not equal to C.

In this example, the entire meaning of the research could be misconstrued. The results discussed are not those of the author ; they are generated from the experiment. To refer to the results in this context is incorrect and should be avoided. To make it more appropriate, the above sentence can be revised as follows:

Based on the results of the assay, A and B did not equal to C.

Second Person Pronouns

The second person point of view uses pronouns that refer to the reader. These are as follows:

This point of view is usually used in the context of providing instructions or advice , such as in “how to” manuals or recipe books. The reason behind using the second person is to engage the reader.

You will want to buy a turkey that is large enough to feed your extended family. Before cooking it, you must wash it first thoroughly with cold water.

Although this is a good technique for giving instructions, it is not appropriate in academic or scientific writing.

Third Person Pronouns

The third person point of view uses both proper nouns, such as a person’s name, and pronouns that refer to individuals or groups (e.g., doctors, researchers) but not directly to the reader. The ones that refer to individuals are as follows:

• Hers (possessive form)
• His (possessive form)
• Its (possessive form)
• One’s (possessive form)

The third person point of view that refers to groups include the following:

• Their (possessive form)
• Theirs (plural possessive form)

Everyone at the convention was interested in what Dr. Johnson presented. The instructors decided that the students should help pay for lab supplies. The researchers determined that there was not enough sample material to conduct the assay.

The third person point of view is generally used in scientific papers but, at times, the format can be difficult. We use indefinite pronouns to refer back to the subject but must avoid using masculine or feminine terminology. For example:

A researcher must ensure that he has enough material for his experiment. The nurse must ensure that she has a large enough blood sample for her assay.

Many authors attempt to resolve this issue by using “he or she” or “him or her,” but this gets cumbersome and too many of these can distract the reader. For example:

A researcher must ensure that he or she has enough material for his or her experiment. The nurse must ensure that he or she has a large enough blood sample for his or her assay.

These issues can easily be resolved by making the subjects plural as follows:

Researchers must ensure that they have enough material for their experiment. Nurses must ensure that they have large enough blood samples for their assay.

Exceptions to the Rules

As mentioned earlier, the third person is generally used in scientific writing, but the rules are not quite as stringent anymore. It is now acceptable to use both the first and third person pronouns  in some contexts, but this is still under controversy.  

In a February 2011 blog on Eloquent Science , Professor David M. Schultz presented several opinions on whether the author viewpoints differed. However, there appeared to be no consensus. Some believed that the old rules should stand to avoid subjectivity, while others believed that if the facts were valid, it didn’t matter which point of view was used.

First or Third Person: What Do The Journals Say

In general, it is acceptable in to use the first person point of view in abstracts, introductions, discussions, and conclusions, in some journals. Even then, avoid using “I” in these sections. Instead, use “we” to refer to the group of researchers that were part of the study. The third person point of view is used for writing methods and results sections. Consistency is the key and switching from one point of view to another within sections of a manuscript can be distracting and is discouraged. It is best to always check your author guidelines for that particular journal. Once that is done, make sure your manuscript is free from the above-mentioned or any other grammatical error.

You are the only researcher involved in your thesis project. You want to avoid using the first person point of view throughout, but there are no other researchers on the project so the pronoun “we” would not be appropriate. What do you do and why? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

I am writing the history of an engineering company for which I worked. How do I relate a significant incident that involved me?

Hi Roger, Thank you for your question. If you are narrating the history for the company that you worked at, you would have to refer to it from an employee’s perspective (third person). If you are writing the history as an account of your experiences with the company (including the significant incident), you could refer to yourself as ”I” or ”My.” (first person) You could go through other articles related to language and grammar on Enago Academy’s website https://enago.com/academy/ to help you with your document drafting. Did you get a chance to install our free Mobile App? https://www.enago.com/academy/mobile-app/ . Make sure you subscribe to our weekly newsletter: https://www.enago.com/academy/subscribe-now/ .

Good day , i am writing a research paper and m y setting is a company . is it ethical to put the name of the company in the research paper . i the management has allowed me to conduct my research in thir company .

thanks docarlene diaz

Generally authors do not mention the names of the organization separately within the research paper. The name of the educational institution the researcher or the PhD student is working in needs to be mentioned along with the name in the list of authors. However, if the research has been carried out in a company, it might not be mandatory to mention the name after the name in the list of authors. You can check with the author guidelines of your target journal and if needed confirm with the editor of the journal. Also check with the mangement of the company whether they want the name of the company to be mentioned in the research paper.

Finishing up my dissertation the information is clear and concise.

How to write the right first person pronoun if there is a single researcher? Thanks

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APA Style: Writing & Citation

• Voice and Tense
• Clarity of Language

First vs Third Person Pronouns

Editorial "we", singular "they".

• Avoiding Bias
• Periods, Commas, and Semicolons
• APA Citation Style This link opens in a new window

APA recommends avoiding the use of the third person when referring to your self as the primary investigator or author.  Use the personal pronoun I or we when referring to steps in an experiment.  (see page 120, 4.16 in the APA 7th Edition Manual)

Correct:   We assessed the vality of the experiment design with a literature review.

Incorrect:   The authors assessed the vality of the experiment with a literature review.

Avoid the use of the editorial or universal  we.   The use of  we  can be confusing because it is not clear to the reader who you are referring to in your research.  Substitute the word  we  with a noun, such as researchers, nurses, or students.  Limit the use of the word  we  to refer to yourself and your coauthors. (See page 120 4.17 in the APA 7th edition manual)

Correct:   Humans experience the world as a spectrum of sights, sounds, and smells.

Incorrect:   We experience the world as a spectrum of sights, sounds, and smells .

The Singular "They" refers to a generic third-person singular pronoun.  APA is promoting the use of the singular "they" as a way of being more inclusive and to avoid assumptions about gender.  Many advocacy groups and publishers are now supporting it.  

Observe the following guidelines when addressing issues surrounding third-person pronouns:

• Always use a person's self identified pronoun.
• Use "they" to refer to a person whose gender is not known.
• Do not use a combination forms, such as "(s)he" and "s/he."
• Reword a sentence to avoid using a pronoun, if the gender is not known.
• You can use the forms of  THEY such as  them, their, theirs, and themselves.  
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• Next: Numbers >>
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Using personal pronouns in research writing

15 October 2009

Should you use “I” or “we” or neither in your thesis or paper?

Thoughts on this have changed over the years. Traditionally, using personal pronouns like “I” and “we” was frowned on. Instead of saying “In Section 3, I have compared the results from method X with those of method Y”, you were expected to write “In section 3, the results from method X are compared with those from method Y”. This is known as writing in the “passive voice” , and for many years it has been considered the “academic” way of doing things. I think it is favoured because of the tone of detachment and impersonality that it helps establish.

Sometimes the passive voice is awkward. For example

In studying ARIMA models, the effect of the estimation method on forecast accuracy was explored.

This is easier to express using “I”:

In studying ARIMA models, I explored the effect of the estimation method on forecast accuracy.

In my exponential smoothing monograph , one of the coauthors preferred to write everything in the passive voice, which led to some rather awkward phrasing. (I edited all chapters to consistently use “we” before it went to print.)

There are still some journals and research supervisors who insist that research writing must be in the passive voice. However, the situation is slowly changing and now many journals accept, or even encourage, the use of personal pronouns. The International Journal of Forecasting which I edit allows authors to use whichever approach they prefer.

A related issue for research students writing a thesis is whether to use “I” or “we”, especially when the material has previously appeared in a co-authored paper. In general, I prefer students to use “I” when they mean the author, as it is their thesis. (The royal “we” should only be used by monarchs.) However, it is very important to include a statement at the front of the thesis clarifying the role of co-authors involved with any parts of the thesis. If a chapter is essentially a co-authored paper, many universities require a signed statement from all authors.

One area where “we” is useful is in referring to the reader and author together. For example,

In the following theorem, we see that …

This is particularly common in mathematics.

In summary:

• Write in the most natural way. It is ok if that means using “I”.
• Use “we” if you mean “the reader and I”, or if you are writing a coauthored paper.
• Don’t use “we” if you only mean yourself.

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Because English has no generic singular—or common-sex—pronoun, we have used HE, HIS, and HIM in such expressions as "the student needs HIS pencil." When we constantly personify "the judge," "the critic," "the executive," "the author," and so forth, as male by using the pronoun HE, we are subtly conditioning ourselves against the idea of a female judge, critic, executive, or author. There are several alternative approaches for ending the exclusion of women that results from the pervasive use of masculine pronouns.

Recast into the plural

• Original: Give each student his paper as soon as he is finished.
• Alternative: Give students their papers as soon as they are finished.

Reword to eliminate gender problems.

• Original: The average student is worried about his grade.
• Alternative: The average student is worried about grades.

Replace the masculine pronoun with ONE, YOU, or (sparingly) HE OR SHE, as appropriate.

• Original: If the student was satisfied with his performance on the pretest, he took the post-test.
• Alternative: A student who was satisfied with her or his performance on the pretest took the post-test.

Alternate male and female examples and expressions. (Be careful not to confuse the reader.)

• Original: Let each student participate. Has he had a chance to talk? Could he feel left out?
• Alternative: Let each student participate. Has she had a chance to talk? Could he feel left out?

Indefinite Pronouns

Using the masculine pronouns to refer to an indefinite pronoun ( everybody, everyone, anybody, anyone ) also has the effect of excluding women. In all but strictly formal uses, plural pronouns have become acceptable substitutes for the masculine singular.

• Original: Anyone who wants to go to the game should bring his money tomorrow.
• Alternative: Anyone who wants to go to the game should bring their money tomorrow.

An alternative to this is merely changing the sentence. English is very flexible, so there is little reason to "write yourself into a corner":

• Original: Anyone who wants to go to the game should bring his money.
• Alternative: People who want to go to the game should bring their money.