Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science

<div><p>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.</p></div

Nonparametric relationships between each narrative element and log(citations).

<p>For continuous variables, spearman correlations are given along with associated p-values. For binary variables, p-values are given for Wilcoxon rank-sum tests.</p

Multipanel plot depicting the relationship between narrativity (individual indicators and single narrativity index given by PC1, labeled individually) and article citation frequency.

<p>The use of sensory language, conjunctions, connectivity, and appeal to the reader are significantly correlated with article citation frequency. PC1 index of narrativity is significantly correlated with article citation frequency (linear regression; shaded area indicates 95% confidence interval for the linear model parameters).</p

The relationship between the narrativity index (PC1) and journal impact factor.

<p>Response variables reflect journal means for articles in our dataset (N = 732); shaded area represents the 95% confidence interval for the best-fit line. Linear regression R² = 0.62, p = 6 x 10⁻⁵.</p