Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science

Peer-reviewed publications focusing on climate change are growing exponentially with the consequence that the uptake and influence of individual papers varies greatly. Here, we derive metrics of narrativity from psychology and literary theory, and use these metrics to test the hypothesis that more narrative climate change writing is more likely to be influential, using citation frequency as a proxy for influence. From a sample of 732 scientific abstracts drawn from the climate change literature, we find that articles with more narrative abstracts are cited more often. This effect is closely associated with journal identity: higher-impact journals tend to feature more narrative articles, and these articles tend to be cited more often. These results suggest that writing in a more narrative style increases the uptake and influence of articles in climate literature, and perhaps in scientific literature more broadly.

聚焦气候变化的同行评议论文正呈指数级增长，由此导致单篇论文的接纳度与影响力差异悬殊。为此，我们借鉴心理学与文学理论中的叙事性指标，以引用频率作为影响力的代理指标，检验“气候变化领域写作的叙事性越强，其影响力便越大”这一假说。我们从气候变化相关文献的732篇科学摘要样本中发现，摘要叙事性更强的论文被引用次数更多。该效应与期刊属性密切相关：高影响力期刊往往刊载叙事性更强的论文，且此类论文的被引频次也更高。上述结果表明，采用更具叙事性的写作风格，能够提升气候变化领域论文乃至更广泛科学文献的传播度与影响力。