The diachronic change in linguistic positivity in the academic book reviewing of language studies: a text-mining analysis

Xueying Liu and Haoran Zhu ()
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Xueying Liu: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Haoran Zhu: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Scientometrics, 2025, vol. 130, issue 1, No 6, 133-157

Abstract: Abstract Previous studies found an increasing trend of linguistic positivity in academic texts. That is, there is a tendency towards using more positive language than negative language in academic writing. However, most of these studies included research articles as the corpus data. Little is known about whether such a trend exists in book reviews, an important academic genre that features evaluative language. Thus, this paper presents a pilot study on the features and temporal dynamics of the positive/negative language of book reviews in the discipline of linguistics. Based on a corpus of 1550 book reviews published between 1990 and 2020, it was found that book reviews have experienced a significant upward trend in terms of both positive words and sentiment scores. Possible reasons and implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords: Linguistic positivity; Book reviews; Text mining; Sentiment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-024-05208-8

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