Towards Positivity: A Large-Scale Diachronic Sentiment Analysis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in China

With its rising number of publications and expanding international collaborations, China’s humanities and social sciences (HSS) research is displaying its potential for global prominence. Researchers have been exploring the development of China’s HSS from different perspectives. However, the examinations from the perspective of sentiment analysis are scanty. Our aim is then to examine the sentiment features in Chinese HSS academic writing, by analyzing a large-scale corpus with over 275 million characters and with a time span from 2000 to 2020. Considering that most studies only focused on abstracts, we examined both the abstracts and the full texts, as well as a direct comparison between them. We found that Chinese HSS academic writing has evolved to be more positively biased in the past two decades, showing an upward trend in the use of positive words and a slight downward trend in the use of negative words. However, the upward trend of positive words in the full texts is not that clear, resembling a fluctuating pattern. Regarding the comparison, the abstracts are more likely to use positive words while the full texts tend to use more negative words. These phenomena can be explained with the social cognitive theory, in that they may be shaped by a joint force of the nature of human beings, the nature of language, the particular socio-cultural background in China and the features of the academic genre.