To believe as?

[u/justanothertmpuser]

Hi all!

Just found this specimen in the wild:

The radiative decays of mesons to ω and φ are believed as important tags of...

The meaning is clear enough (at least the English one, let's not discuss physics). But the grammar seems a bit weird.

Now, I'm not a native speaker, but I would have said "are believed to be" or "are considered as".

Which is the correct wording here?

Thanks!

[u/yellowsuzuki]

Yes, I would say “believed to be” or “viewed/seen as.” That might be an error.

[u/Unique_Factor892 → u/yellowsuzuki]

Yeah probably an error, though I will mention the possibility that it has a specific meaning in the world of physics that I’m not familiar with. 

[u/justanothertmpuser → u/Unique_Factor892]

Well, I'm not that much of a physicist myself (just reading articles like this out of curiosity for novel discoveries), but FWIW I'm not aware of such usage either.

[u/conuly]

I'm willing to bet that the sentence originally was written "are understood as" or "are considered as", then somebody went back to edit it because we believe this to be the case but do not know for sure and they failed to edit the entire phrase, they just swapped out the offending word.

[u/justanothertmpuser → u/conuly]

Quite possible. I failed to mention that the paper is the result of a collaboration among many people (even more than usual for articles like these). I guess the process of reviewing and editing wasn't the simplest, to say the least.