Multipanel plot depicting the relationship between narrativity (individual indicators and single narrativity index given by PC1, labeled individually) and article citation frequency. While this method is costly, it does possibly alleviate some of the quality assurance and control issues of other crowdsourcing methods. The idea is to have higher-quality contributors who offer a bit more technical expertise than just your average person off the street. Each abstract considered was examined by multiple independent contributors from the site. The platform works by having multiple contributors who work for the site and who are paid small amounts of money for completing tasks-in this case tasks examining scientific abstracts based on the six defined criteria. One unique method applied in this work, is the use of a crowdsourcing platform called CrowdFlower. “People think that stories are shaped by people. In addition to these narrative elements, the length of the abstract, number of authors, year of publication, journal identity, and journal impact factor were also considered as these are known factors that influence citation frequency. The authors also note that “logical linkages” were also explicitly considered.Īppeal – There is the question, of course, of why do we care? What is the point of this work? A narrative must include some form of commentary, evaluation or “landscape of consciousness.” Does the work make an appeal or clear recommendation? The authors used the presence of conjunctions to determine the “extent to which an abstract is logically ordered, based on the observation that a temporal or causal ordering of events is an essential, and distinguishing, characteristic of narratives.”Ĭonnectivity – The use of words or phrases that create contextually explicit links within a narrative creates a sense of “connectivity” either through repetition or references to previous statements. As defined by the authors, this includes narrative expressions of “emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and interpretations.”Ĭonjunctions – The logical ordering of a narrative through the use of conjunctions to connect words and phrases results in prose with momentum towards a conclusion or completion. Sensory Language – Language that appeals to the senses or emotions can be used to create a connection with the reader to the work. In-text reference to the narrator through pronouns such as “I”, “we”, and “our” was assessed to quantify narrative perspective. A first-person narrator is a typically stronger narrative presence than a third-person narrator. Narrative Perspective – The role of the narrator distinguishes stories from other forms of communication. Abstracts were gleaned for a mention of either time or place. The reader wants to know where and when something is happening. Setting – A successful narrative relies on a consideration of time and place. The authors define six factors that influence narrativity: And as it turns out, the whole world loves a story. Using citation frequency as a proxy for impact, the authors restricted their look to climate change research and began with the hypothesis that the presence of a more narrative focused text, would result in a higher citation frequency. Kelly, and Terrie Klinger used a crowdsourcing platform to examine 732 scientific abstracts from 19 journals for narrative style. While we have all read our fair share of dense and unapproachable manuscripts, how much does narrative style affect the impact of our science? In the recent PLOS One work, “ Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science,” authors Ann Hillier, Ryan P. If your prose resembles the start of this post, most people are likely to never read it and whatever amazing work you did in the lab or the field will be relegated to the shelf-sad and unread. See what I did there? There are some papers and writers who amaze us with their style and their readability. Scientific writing is often belied as dry, stale a block of indomitable, indecipherable text buttressed with vague language, passive voice, countless equations, and overly constructed, borderline-run-on sentences that seem to drag on and on and on. “We owe it to each other to tell stories.”
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