I opened up that plugin (WP-PostRatings) and located the get_most_rated() function.
It’s in the following file: includes/postratings-stats.php
In that file, on line 57 you get the following:
foreach ($most_rated as $post) {
$output .= expand_ratings_template($temp, $post, null, $chars, false)."\n";
}
From that, I went searching for the expand_ratings_template() function.
Found that in the following file: wp-postratings.php
In that file starting at line 1182 you get the following:
if ( strpos( $template, '%POST_EXCERPT%') !== false ) {
if ( get_the_ID() !== $post_id ) {
$post = get_post($post_id);
}
$post_excerpt = ratings_post_excerpt( $post_id, $post->post_excerpt, $post->post_content );
$value = str_replace('%POST_EXCERPT%', $post_excerpt, $value );
}
if ( strpos( $template, '%POST_CONTENT%' ) !== false ) {
if ( get_the_ID() !== $post_id ) {
$post = get_post( $post_id );
}
$value = str_replace('%POST_CONTENT%', get_the_content(), $value );
}
if ( strpos( $template, '%POST_THUMBNAIL%') !== false ) {
if ( get_the_ID() !== $post_id ) {
$post = get_post( $post_id );
}
$value = str_replace( '%POST_THUMBNAIL%', get_the_post_thumbnail( $post, 'thumbnail' ), $value );
}
What I see there is that it is actually looking for both the excerpt and the full post content which leads me to believe that there may be a setting somewhere in the plugin on what to display.
If it’s not an option then check your posts to see if they have a manual ‘excerpt’ set… …it may be checking if you specified an ‘excerpt’ and using that.
If you need to change the way this functions you’re best off cloning those two functions, adding them to your theme’s functions.php file naming them something different and then using those instead of the plugin’s outputs.