Is academic writing becoming more positive? A large-scale diachronic case study of Science research articles across 25 years

Abstract

Academic writing is developing to be more positive. This linguistic positivity bias is confirmed in academic writing across disciplines and genres. The current research adopted sentiment analysis and examined the diachronic change in linguistic positivity in the full texts of 2,556 research articles published in Science in 25 years. The results showed that academic writing in research articles in the journal Science has become significantly more positive in the past 25 years. The findings of this study confirm linguistic positivity bias in academic writing based on empirical data from Science. Reasons for the increasingly positive language use in science articles might include the popularization of science, the growing number of researchers, and the difficulty of publishing in high-impact journals. Finally, this study discussed the implications of our findings for researchers, editors, and peer reviewers.

Linguistic positivity in soft and hard disciplines: temporal dynamics, disciplinary variation, and the relationship with research impact

“…Our results showed that article abstracts in the examined disciplines have indeed experienced an increasing trend in terms of both the frequency of positive words and sentiment scores. The results lend support to the findings of previous studies (Bordignon et al, 2021 ; Yuan & Yao, 2022 ) by showing that the increasing trend of linguistic positivity bias may be a common phenomenon across academic disciplines. Such a trend may be attributable to the universal positivity bias in natural language (Dodds et al, 2015 ).…”

“…This lexicon is large, comprehensive, and manually sentiment-tagged with great care (Wen & Lei, 2022 ). It has been well-tested and used in previous studies, and is believed to be robust and reliable in sentiment analysis (Liu & Lei, 2018 ; Wen & Lei, 2022 ; Yuan & Yao, 2022 ). Last, we extracted the raw citation counts received by each paper from the downloaded bibliographic information.…”

“…It was found that authors tend to use more positive words and fewer negative words after the outbreak of the pandemic. More recently, Yuan and Yao ( 2022 ) investigated the diachronic change of linguistic positivity in articles published in the journal Science which covers a wide variety of disciplines. The results show that the language of Science articles has become more positive over the past 25 years.…”

“…The results show that the language of Science articles has become more positive over the past 25 years. The attempts of both Bordignon et al ( 2021 ) and Yuan and Yao ( 2022 ) are significant in that they expanded the scope of previous research by adopting a more macro multidisciplinary perspective, which provided implications for practitioners from across academia and industry. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the examined disciplines in both studies were treated homogeneously and mixed into one dataset.…”

A diachronic corpus-based study of hedging in L2 postgraduate theses in civil engineering

“…Such an investigation could provide a complementary addition by shedding light on the differential utilisation of hedging devices across different time periods. This is especially pertinent considering the limited exploration of diachronic trends in hedging (Yao, Wei, & Wang, 2023), and the conflicting findings in existing diachronic studies . For instance, Šandová (2021) scrutinised a corpus of research article abstracts published in the Journal of Pragmatics and observed a significant decrease in the occurrence of hedging devices over the past three decades.…”