Sentiment analysis as a measure of conservation culture in scientific literature

Culturomics is emerging as an important field within science, a way to measure attitudes and beliefs and their dynamics across time and space via quantitative analysis of digitized data from literature, news, film, social media, and more. Sentiment analysis is an emerging tool for culturomics that, within the last decade, has provided a means to quantify the polarity of attitudes expressed within various media. Conservation science is a crisis discipline and one in which accurate and effective communication are paramount to success. We investigated how conservation scientists communicate their findings through one of their primary media: scientific journal articles. We analysed 15,001 abstracts from papers published in conservation-focused journals published in the last 20 years, 1998-2017. Papers were categorized by year, focal taxa, and their conservation status; the mean sentiment scores were then extracted from the abstract using four lexicons (Jockers-Rinker, NRC, Bing et al., and AFINN). We found no annual trend in the sentiment scores of papers across conservation literature but analysis of absolute values suggested increasing polarization of language over time (i.e. less neutral). We also observed a trend towards increasing negativity along the spectrum of IUCN Red List categories (i.e. from Least Concern to Critically Endangered to Extinct), though this relationship was not significant. There were some clear differences in the sentiments with which research on different taxa were reported, however. For example, abstracts mentioning lobe finned fishes tended to have high sentiment scores, which we hypothesize may be related to the rediscovery of the coelacanth driving a positive narrative. Contrastingly, abstracts mentioning elasmobranchs had low scores, reflecting the negative sentiment score associated with the word "sharks". Sentiment analysis is an exciting frontier with applications in science and we suggest a new science-based lexicon be developed for applying this tool to conservation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.