Science convergence in affective research is associated with impactful multidisciplinary appeal rather than multidisciplinary content

Abstract

Affectivism is a research trend dedicated to the study of emotions and their role in cognition and human behavior. Affectivism both complements and competes with cognitivism, which typically neglects affect in explaining behavior. By the nature of their subject, both affectivism and cognitivism constitute fertile grounds for studying the confluence of conceptual knowledge from diverse disciplines, which is often credited with major breakthroughs and is known as convergence science. Analyzing over half a million relevant publications from PubMed, selected according to psychologist chosen MeSH terms, we find that affectivism yields higher impact than cognitivism, as measured through normalized citations. Importantly, this higher impact is strongly associated with higher multidisciplinarity in the citations of affectivism publications but lower multidisciplinarity in the papers themselves. Hence, the case of affectivism suggests that research content of low topical diversity but broad value can generate strong and wide-ranging scholarly impact, feeding downstream convergence. Affective research generates more diverse citations that cover a higher variety of research fields when compared to cognitive research. This occurs despite a more narrow focus of topics included in the original affective articles themselves