For many, tendentious is a fancy, unfamiliar word used by academics in an attempt to impress you with their erudition and confuse you about their purposes. But it should be employed more in common speech and writing because it is apt as a label for which no other word is as good. According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, it is defined as having or showing a definite tendency or bias. In clinical investigations, we should recognize it, because tendentiousness is imbued to some degree in a host of articles in radiology which, without reading the abstract, one can guess at the conclusions presented in the introduction. After perusing the imaging literature, an innocent may think he is clairvoyant by predicting outcome just from the title of the article. In such reports, there will almost always be one statistically significant lesson to be presented and confirmed (I did not say learned), and the results will almost always be in line with the authors’ preconceptions, even if the upshot of the premise is revisionism of a previous widely held view.

Tendentiousness perhaps cannot be avoided because often the validity of a cherished theory requires one to make the results come out right. And thus when an initial evaluation of the facts allows one to draw no conclusions, the tendentious temptation lures and entreats the investigators to change the premise and the terms of the study.