ArticleScientometrics2022
Is academic writing becoming more positive? A large-scale diachronic case study of Science research articles across 25 years.
Article in Scientometrics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- The hidden cost of positivity: Ensuring integrity in scientific research.Science advances · 2026Review
- The International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR) critiques of alcohol research: Promoting health benefits and downplaying harms.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- The rise of promotional rhetoric in the Discussion Sections of an interdisciplinary field: a diachronic perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Expressions of uncertainty in online science communication hinder information diffusion.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Does writing style affect gender differences in the research performance of articles?: An empirical study of BERT-based textual sentiment analysis.Scientometrics · 2023Article
- Linguistic positivity in soft and hard disciplines: temporal dynamics, disciplinary variation, and the relationship with research impact.Scientometrics · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.