基于情感词汇的科研论文写作风格演变研究——1994-2012年科研论文摘要中情感词汇使用情况的回顾性分析

Research on the Evolution of Scientific Writing Style between1994 and 2012 Based on Emotional Vocabulary Perspective:A Retrospective Analysis

本文通过对科研论文中情感词汇的使用情况进行回顾性分析,探讨科研工作者的学术写作风格的演变情况。以1994—2012年间"计算机"学科共31本不同质量等级的中文期刊刊载的21万多篇科研论文为研究对象,采用数据驱动的方法描绘75个情感词汇在论文摘要中"绝对频率"和"相对频率"的时间分布情况,并将中文文献结果与同时期《ACM美国计算机学会全文数据库》中收录的"计算机"学科的16多万篇英文文献进行比较研究,发现不同语言、期刊质量等级的科研论文中含有积极词汇的摘要所占比例的逐年增加,反映了学者在学术写作风格上越来越多地使用情感词汇,尤其是积极词汇。这一方面和近年来积极的科学发现的迅速涌现有关,另一方面也说明科研工作者越来越倾向于采用一种乐观的学术写作风格。

With an impressive development of science and technology over past decades,more scientific papers are published now before ever before.At the meanwhile,owing to the expansion of scientific research field,it is increasingly difficult to get research papers published in high impact journals,which is very important to scientists since the quantity and quality of publications have a considerable effect on their reputation and promotion.Consequently,in order to get papers published,scientists had to change their scientific writing style,which led to the evolution of scientific writing style over time.In this paper,we try to find the potential patterns under the evolution of scientific writing style between 1994 and 2012from the emotional vocabulary perspective.The dataset was selected from China Journal Full-text Database and Association for Computing Machinery（ACM）Full-text Database,which contains all215,515 scientific papers from ＂computer science＂in Chinese,and 161,428 from ＂computer science＂in English.This experiment was conducted mainly from the following several aspects.First of all,we selected 75 emotional vocabularies（25positive words,25 negative words and 25 neutral words included）by three times group brain storm.Second,we depict the yearly absolute and relative frequency patterns of positive word,negative word,neutral word and 100 random words respectively between 1994-2012.Finally,we compared the absolute and relative frequency patterns of emotional vocabularies in different language and different level of journals.By the comparative analysis with the absolute and relative frequency patterns of emotional vocabularies,we find that the emotional vocabulary is both increasingly used in scientific writing in different languages and all levels of journals,especially positive words,which probably related to the emergence of positive scientific findings and also reflects scientist are more likely to use an optimistic writing style.