描述前人工作的局限或者失败，一般在语言上避免明显的贬低就行了。但是，有一些工作难度非常大，作者在提到前人成就的时候，对那些牛人非常崇敬，但又极不宁愿地判定他们的失败，就可能会这么说：

despite some heroic attempts [Tsang and Dealy (1981)], a constitutive theory that accurately predicts measured nonsinusoidal stress responses to oscillatory shear has not been published.

–J. Rheol. 37:919

“极端温和”是不是极端条件的一种？极端条件包括极高温（压）或逼近绝对零度（真空）等，同时还包括“极端温和”：

Polymerized liposomes formed under extremely mild conditions…

–JACS 108:7789

理论模型的发展完善可以参照软件工程的概念，打上版本号，将来可能有beta版，正式版发布还要定个市场价。针对不同用户还有不同版本，比如数学差的就用“简易版”，数学牛的就用“旗舰版”。要注意购买正版哦，否则后续发布的补丁就下载不了了：

Hereafter, we will call the original hierarchical model [Larson (200)] and its modified version [Park et al. (2005)] the “hierarchical-1.0″ model and the hierarchical-2.0” model, respectively…In the current work, we introduce an updated version of the hierarchical-2.0 model, called the “hierarchical-3.0” model, which, includes several refinements …

–J. Rheol. 54:223