Citation Sentiment Reflects Multiscale Sociocultural Norms

TL;DR

This study analyzes how citation sentiment varies across different sociocultural scales, revealing that collaboration, discipline, and national cultural norms influence the positivity or criticism in scientific citations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that citation sentiment reflects multiscale sociocultural norms, providing insights into how human factors shape scientific communication and knowledge dissemination.

Findings

Researchers cite collaborators more favorably than non-collaborators.

Higher h-index scholars cite lower h-index scholars more critically.

Wetlab disciplines tend to be less critical than drylab disciplines.

Abstract

Modern science is formally structured around scholarly publication, where scientific knowledge is canonized through citation. Precisely how citations are given and accrued can provide information about the value of discovery, the history of scientific ideas, the structure of fields, and the space or scope of inquiry. Yet parsing this information has been challenging because citations are not simply present or absent; rather, they differ in purpose, function, and sentiment. In this paper, we investigate how critical and favorable sentiments are distributed across citations, and demonstrate that citation sentiment tracks sociocultural norms across scales of collaboration, discipline, and country. At the smallest scale of individuals, we find that researchers cite scholars they have collaborated with more favorably (and less critically) than scholars they have not collaborated with. Outside collaborative relationships, higher h-index scholars cite lower h-index scholars more critically. At the mesoscale of disciplines, we find that wetlab disciplines tend to be less critical than drylab disciplines, and disciplines that engage in more synthesis through publishing more review articles tend to be less critical. At the largest scale of countries, we find that greater individualism (and lesser acceptance of the unequal distribution of power) is associated with more critical sentiment. Collectively, our results demonstrate how sociocultural factors can explain variations in sentiment in scientific communication. As such, our study contributes to a broader understanding of how human factors influence the practice of science, and underscores the importance of considering the larger sociocultural contexts in which science progresses.