Engineers connect advances in basic science to large-scale applications in real-world systems. In chemical engineering, this role includes designing and implementing chemical processes and systems, as well as constructing frameworks to quantitatively assess potential alternatives. In recent decades, the dimensionality of these frameworks has grown due to evolving views as to what makes a chemical process ‘valuable’; this growth has led to an increase in complexity — and, at times, ambiguity — of the methods and language used to describe emerging alternatives.

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As a journal publishing chemical engineering research, the aim is to showcase the latest scientific and engineering advances in chemical process and systems design. What constitutes an advance, however, is not universal (if it ever was). Just as in decades past, modern process engineers continue to optimize for traditional variables such as cost-effectiveness, stability, durability and safety. But today, additional factors must be considered in process analysis, such as potential direct and indirect adverse environmental impacts of the proposed design.

The complex landscape of comparative analysis, and in particular the vector-valued nature of modern objective functions, has increased the importance of linguistic precision in describing these optimization problems. For example, comparative statements such as ‘greener’ (or ‘cheaper’, ‘more sustainable’, ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘more stable’) run the risk of hyperbole without quantitative benchmarking and a well-defined reference frame. These terms play a key role in driving scientific advance and eventual technological translation, but their impact is maximized only when their implications are clearly defined.

This Editorial follows recent Editorials from Nature Nanotechnology1 and Nature Catalysis2 on the use of hype and hyperbolic language in disseminating results, and their respective impacts on scientific progress. Like our colleagues, our editorial office at Nature Chemical Engineering takes steps to ensure that authors provide support for, temper or remove the use of potentially hyperbolic or subjective language in our articles. In this Editorial, we particularly want to emphasize the importance of precisely addressing questions that illuminate quantitative process and system comparisons that are key to our readership, such as: “Under which assumptions?”, “Under which conditions?” and “At what scales?”.

Of course, we recognize that a singular submitted article is often part of a larger narrative; it is unrealistic to require the potential impact of a process over all parameter space and at every scale to be known from the outset. Relatedly, a process advance need not be superlative in every dimension to be a valuable scientific contribution. We encourage adopting language acknowledging these uncertainties because uncertainty is itself an important aspect of scientific progress: in our view, stating that a process is “potentially more sustainable if”, or “is stable only under … conditions”, does not detract from, but rather adds to, its scientific value.

Our message would, of course, ring hollow without acknowledging that the funding, career advancement, popular media and publishing landscapes have influenced the linguistic trends that exist in the literature today. Indeed, a major driving force behind this Editorial was to concretely put forth our team’s commitment to supporting our authors in articulating the complexities and uncertainties in comparative analyses.

The challenges we face today demand cohesive and coherent efforts across the field; we believe that a big part of fostering these efforts is to both support our authors in assessing comparative performance where they can, and to give them the space to acknowledge uncertainties where they cannot.