Emotional Elements in Scientific Publications' Abstracts: An Affective-Centric Experiment

Scientists play a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of the world, contributing not only through objective and rational work but also by incorporating their emotions into scientific discourse. The affective side of science is gaining increased attention. Building on this line of inquiry, this study explores the impact of emotional elements and sentiment analysis within abstracts published in the journal Nature over the past 10 years, adopting an affective-centric perspective on scientific endeavors. The research aims to explore the presence and trends of emotional elements and sentiments in these abstracts and to investigate the correlation between these emotional elements and citation counts, considering the influence of emotions on decision-making. The novelty of this research lies in not only considering sentiment analysis but also employing two distinct emotion detection techniques on the abstracts. The study employs a hybrid approach that integrates Lexicon-based, Deep Learning (DL), and Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) sentiment analysis methods to explore diverse emotional dimensions through text emotion detection. The results demonstrate the presence of emotions and positive sentiment trends in the abstracts and positive sentiments in scientific abstracts were more prevalent and are associated with higher citation rates. It also highlights the observation that diverse emotions are prevalent in the most cited papers.