It is a weasel phrase: It gets you out of citing your source for the information, which deprives the reader of judging its accuracy for themselves. I'd probabl

It is a weasel phrase: It gets you out of citing your source for the information, which deprives the reader of judging its accuracy for themselves. I'd probably write it this way: "Jones (2018) showed that regular patterns of drought and precipitation coincide with cycles of sunspot activity."