Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

翻译：新颖性是评估学术论文质量的关键指标。学者们致力于突出其工作的创新之处，尤以标题、摘要和引言部分为甚。同行评审作为科学严谨性的守门人，严格评估论文的新颖性，但作者自我宣传与评审人评估之间可能存在认知鸿沟。为探究此问题，我们分析了2016年至2021年间发表在《自然·通讯》上的15,328篇学术论文及其同行评审意见。研究发现，评审人与作者均强调结果导向的创新，而评审人采用更全面的评估视角。此外，通过检验宣传强度与论文固有新颖性的关系，我们发现其效果取决于论文的实际创新水平。高创新性论文得益更强的宣传用语，获得更多正面评价。我们还发现，宣传用语仅对中等创新水平论文的新颖性评审分歧具有显著关联性，而对极高或极低创新性论文影响甚微。这揭示了宣传用语如何在学术评价的灰色地带发挥最显著作用。