Nothing. “The present study” is grammatically fine. The problem is what happens when it shows up nine times in one results section: it starts costing your reader effort for no reason, and in an abstract it eats words you don’t have to spare. The fix is simple enough to repeat in the hallway: swap “the present study” for “we” when you can, and “this study” when one clean noun phrase will do.
This is Writing Tip 13, and it’s one of the ones that comes up again and again in edited manuscripts — not because anyone was taught to write it, but because it’s the safe, careful phrase you reach for when you’re not sure “we” is allowed.
Why “the present study” is the wrong kind of correct
Two things go wrong when you lean on it too hard.
The first is plain repetition. If every paragraph in your discussion opens with “the present study found” or “the present study suggests,” the reader stops reading the phrase and starts skimming past it — which means they might skim past the sentence too. Worse, if you’re also citing other work, a page full of identical noun phrases makes it genuinely harder to tell which “study” you mean at any given moment. The repetition that was meant to sound careful ends up reading as vague.
The second is subtler, and it has a name: markedness. Common words take less mental effort to process than uncommon ones, even when both are correct. “The present study” is a marked phrase — three words doing the job “we” or “this study” could do in one. It doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds like it’s trying, and reviewers notice when prose is trying.
In an abstract, where every journal enforces a hard word limit, that difference is not cosmetic. “The present study demonstrates” versus “we show” is three words you could have spent on your actual finding.
The two fixes, and when each one works
First person, when you want to be direct. “We found that female gender predicted lower continuation rates” reads as ordinary, confident academic English — because it is. If you want to flag that you’re talking about your own current results rather than someone else’s, add “here”: “Our results here demonstrate…” And when you’re contrasting your findings with earlier work, “previous” or “past” does the same job for the other side: “Previous studies reported X; here, we found Y.”
“This study,” when you want to stay in third person. It’s interchangeable with “the present study” and shorter: “This study investigated individual and environmental factors” instead of “The present study investigated…” Same meaning, one fewer marked word.
One real catch: don’t reach for “this study” when you’re discussing more than one study in the same breath. “This study” only works if there’s exactly one obvious referent nearby. If your paragraph mentions your own work alongside two prior papers, “this study” becomes ambiguous exactly where you needed clarity — and “the present study,” clunky as it is, at least disambiguates. Know the exception before you apply the rule.
Try it on your own draft
Search your manuscript for “the present study.” Every hit is a decision point: if it’s competing with other studies in the same sentence, keep it. Everywhere else, try “we” first, then “this study” if you need the distance of third person. Read the sentence aloud afterwards — if it sounds like something you’d actually say to a labmate, you’ve made the right call.
Choosing the least effortful correct word is a general skill, not just a fix for one phrase — there’s a video on choosing the best word or phrase in your writing if you want the wider version of this same judgement call. It also gets its own chapter — on mastering similar words in your research paper — in Uni-edit’s book on fixing academic English.
If this kind of line-by-line rewording is the part you’d rather hand off, that’s exactly what Level 3 editing does — a paper-wide pass for phrasing, repetition and structure, not just grammar.
And if you’d rather have tips like this land in your inbox before you hit the phrase in your own draft, you can sign up for our writing and publication emails.
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