Positive language in research: a comparison across disciplines

by Hilde van Zeeland

At Writefull, we use customized AI to help students and researchers improve their writing. To support this, we regularly analyze the linguistic patterns that make research writing unique. In this analysis, we look at the language of positivity: what ‘good news’ is reported in published papers, and how does this vary across different disciplines?

Our analysis

We analyzed a dataset of Open Access papers from ten different fields, parsing combinations of adverbs, verbs, and nouns. To ensure consistency and completeness, we lemmatized the data; meaning we combined different forms of the same phrase (for instance, ‘succesfully solve/solving/solved/solves problem/problems’ were grouped into ‘succesfully solve problem’).

Using this structured data, we examined which positive adverbs were most frequently used across disciplines (Part 1) and identified the verbs and nouns they were commonly paired with (Part 2). The results show us how each field celebrates its achievements.

Results

Part 1: Which positive adverbs are most commonly used?

We began by identifying the 600 most frequent adverb-verb-noun combinations across all ten disciplines. From these, we extracted 17 positive adverbs that were used frequently in every field (‘effectively’, ‘successfully’, ‘accurately’). We excluded those that sounded positive but, looking at the data, were often used to bring neutral or negative news–such as ‘considerably’, ‘properly’, ‘clearly’, and ‘significantly’.

The image below shows the adverbs’ relative frequency across the ten disciplines. While the most frequent adverbs–‘effectively’ and ‘better’, for example–are used in all disciplines, we do see differences. The word ‘interestingly’, for instance, appears very frequently in Biology and Medicine, but is hardly used in Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics.

Part 2: What do different disciplines talk about positively?

Next, we looked at what it is that researchers write about positively. We took the five most frequent positive adverbs, and identified which verbs and nouns these were most often paired with. Three disciplines had to be excluded for this part of the analysis, as their datasets were too small to be representative.

The image below shows the results. To take a closer look, you can also download the visualization and discipline-specific images from this folder, and find close-up images at the bottom of this blog post.

For each discipline, you can see the relative frequency of the noun-verb combinations following each adverb, in percentages.

We can see clear disciplinary differences. For example:

  • In the context of ‘accurately’, Biology papers often discuss ‘accurately predicting prognosis’, Computer Science and Engineering papers focus on ‘accurately predicting models’, and Chemistry talks about ‘accurately weighing mg’.
  • Looking at ‘better’, we see that Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics refer mostly to ‘performance’ (of a method, model, etc.), where Biology and Medicine aim for better ‘understanding’ (of a mechanism, role, etc.).
  • When it comes to ‘effectively’, we see that almost all fields appreciate the effective ‘solving of problems’, while Biology and Medicine primarily aim to effectively ‘inhibit/reduce growth’.
  • ‘Successfully’ also shows some interesting disciplinary differences, like ‘successfully helping civilians’ (Agriculture), ‘successfully synthesizing nanoparticles’ (Chemistry), and ‘successfully obtaining solutions’ (Mathematics).

For all disciplines, looking at the tail of less frequent word combinations shows more disciplinary focus areas of positive language. Take these examples from the top tens of each discipline:

  • Agriculture: effectively control weeds, accurately identify species
  • Chemistry: effectively separate compounds, accurately dilute solutions, successfully fabricate cells
  • Engineering: successfully avoid obstacle, successfully resist attack
  • Biology: effectively kill cell, better understand pathogenesis, successfully undergo surgery
  • Computer science: accurately extract information, successfully log user
  • Medicine: effectively relieve pain, better understand pathophysiology, accurately predict survival
  • Mathematics: effectively reduce error, accurately track trajectory, successfully stabilize system

Learn more

At Writefull, we’re passionate about language and science, and we bring these worlds together through analyses like this. There’s much more to uncover, so stay tuned for future insights! If you’re looking for the right words for your own research, see how Writefull can support your writing in Word and Overleaf.

Images by discipline: