The Evolution of Narrativity in Abstracts of the Biomedical Literature between 1989 and 2022

Abstract

Previous analysis has shown that the use of narrative devices in the biomedical literature has changed over time. The purpose of the present study was to measure the degree of narrativity in corpora of scientific abstracts obtained from Pubmed through the use of a proprietary software LIWC 2022, which, based on pre-set dictionaries, attributes scores for Staging, Plot Progression and Cognitive Tension to texts. Each text is automatically divided into a number of segments, so that the score change can be assessed throughout the different parts of a text, thus identifying its narrative arc. We systematically applied the scoring system to a corpus of 680,000 abstracts from manuscripts of any kind and genre published in the years 1989–2022 and indexed in MEDLINE, an independent corpus of 680,000 abstracts of Primary studies published in the same years, and finally a corpus of 680,000 abstracts of Review papers that appeared in the 1989–2022 interval. We were able to create plots of the pattern of how these three scores changed over time in each corpus and observed that the prototypical pattern observed in narrative texts, e.g., novels, is not seen in abstracts of the scientific literature, which, however, mostly possess a diverse but quite reproducible pattern. Overall, Reviews better conform to a higher degree of narrativity than Primary studies.