Do ‘tortured phrases’ exist in the psychology literature, and are there psychology-specific ‘tortured phrases’?
Abstract
Objectives: The psychology literature is occasionally quoted as being in a replication crisis due to the inability to replicate key findings caused by either integrity issues, or weak scientific protocols. This paper focuses on an unexplored topic in psychological science, ‘tortured phrases’, first to appreciate whether any psychology literature might contain such ambiguous terms, even if they are not related to psychology per se. Methods and Results: The Tortured Phrases Detector (TPD) of the Problematic Paper Screener revealed 36 journal articles (including one proceedings paper) with tortured phrases, 14 of which have been retracted to date (10 October 2025). We then induced, using a free online paraphraser, a novel methodology for detecting ‘tortured phrases’, by converting 50 standard psychological terms that started with the letter “A” into purposefully created ‘tortured phrases’. We employed Google Scholar to detect whether any of these created ‘tortured phrases’ might actually exist in published literature. The second method, with only 50 terms, was able to detect at least one potential ‘tortured phrase’ (“evaluation utensil” used to represent “assessment instrument”). Conclusions: The exploratory nature of the methodology was prone to false positives but had success. It is our hope that this study will inspire further attempts to detect tortured phrases in psychology literature in order to further increase the scientific and ethical rigor in the field of psychology.
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BibTeX
@misc{nebl2026tortured,
title = {{Do ‘tortured phrases’ exist in the psychology literature, and are there psychology-specific ‘tortured phrases’?}},
author = {Patrick Nebl and Mark G McCoy and Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/th3r2_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/th3r2_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Do ‘tortured phrases’ exist in the psychology literature, and are there psychology-specific ‘tortured phrases’?
AU - Patrick Nebl
AU - Mark G McCoy
AU - Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/th3r2_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/th3r2_v1/
AB - Objectives: The psychology literature is occasionally quoted as being in a replication crisis due to the inability to replicate key findings caused by either integrity issues, or weak scientific protocols. This paper focuses on an unexplored topic in psychological science, ‘tortured phrases’, first to appreciate whether any psychology literature might contain such ambiguous terms, even if they are not related to psychology per se. Methods and Results: The Tortured Phrases Detector (TPD) of the Problematic Paper Screener revealed 36 journal articles (including one proceedings paper) with tortured phrases, 14 of which have been retracted to date (10 October 2025). We then induced, using a free online paraphraser, a novel methodology for detecting ‘tortured phrases’, by converting 50 standard psychological terms that started with the letter “A” into purposefully created ‘tortured phrases’. We employed Google Scholar to detect whether any of these created ‘tortured phrases’ might actually exist in published literature. The second method, with only 50 terms, was able to detect at least one potential ‘tortured phrase’ (“evaluation utensil” used to represent “assessment instrument”). Conclusions: The exploratory nature of the methodology was prone to false positives but had success. It is our hope that this study will inspire further attempts to detect tortured phrases in psychology literature in order to further increase the scientific and ethical rigor in the field of psychology.
ER -