What does "is seen to be" mean?

I am writing an academic article and to give conservative opinion, I am thinking to use the following statement:

XXX is seen to give worse results and therefore excluded in our report.

I am writing to confirm this surely give a "conservative sentiment" and does not lead to any misleadings or inappropriate in writing research papers. Thank you!

Solution 1:

It is not clear from your sentence that this is intended to be a conservative estimate; don't use this phrasing.

"Seen to be" carries an implication of some unspecified "agent" having made a judgment/observation.

XXX is seen to give worse results

vaguely implies something like:

(someone: the scientific community? unspecified experts? you?) have the opinion/observed that XXX gives worse results.

It's a colloquial phrase that shows up quite often, but I would advise avoiding it completely. It has the same issue as other phrasing like "people are saying" or "people agree that", etc; if someone reputable has dismissed a certain finding, or there are papers critiquing an approach, or there are observations that a method is suboptimal, cite those findings instead. If you're meaning that you've observed it yourself, say that.

What you probably actually mean to say is:

XXX gives worse results

so just say that, no need to add excess words that imply consensus without providing any support. You're arguing it deserves being omitted from your analysis, so you better have a pretty good reason to exclude it, so say that reason:

XXX performed poorly compared to YYY and ZZZ, and therefore is excluded from our report.

There is no need to bother being conservative, just to make your criteria clear.

Alternatively, you may have actually used XXX and found worse results. If so, say it. Your proposed wording does not indicate that you are the one that found worse performance/whatever with XXX.