Citation Sentiment Reflects Multiscale Sociocultural Norms
Xiaohuan Xia, Mathieu Ouellet, Shubhankar P. Patankar, Diana I. Tamir, and Dani S. Bassett

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.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsComputational and Text Analysis Methods · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
