The relationship between journal citation impact and citation sentiment: A study of 32 million citances in PubMed Central

Abstract

Citation sentiment plays an important role in citation analysis and scholarly communication research, but prior citation sentiment studies have used small data sets and relied largely on manual annotation. This paper uses a large data set of PubMed Central (PMC) full-text publications and analyzes citation sentiment in more than 32 million citances within PMC, revealing citation sentiment patterns at the journal and discipline levels. This paper finds a weak relationship between a journal’s citation impact (as measured by CiteScore) and the average sentiment score of citances to its publications. When journals are aggregated into quartiles based on citation impact, we find that journals in higher quartiles are cited more favorably than those in the lower quartiles. Further, social science journals are found to be cited with higher sentiment, followed by engineering and natural science and biomedical journals, respectively. This result may be attributed to disciplinary discourse patterns in which social science researchers tend to use more subjective terms to describe others’ work than do natural science or biomedical researchers.