The Affective Science Network: A Fieldwide Map of over 1 Million Citations.

Abstract

Research in affective science includes over one hundred thousand articles, the vast majority of which have been published in only the past two decades. The size and rapid growth of this field have led to unique challenges for the twenty-first-century scientist including how to develop both breadth and depth of scholarship, curb siloing and promote integrative and interdisciplinary framework, and represent and monitor the field in its entirety. Here, we help address these issues by compactly mapping out this enormous field using citation network analysis (CNA). We generated a citation matrix of over 100,000 publications and over 1 million citations since the seminal works on emotion by Charles Darwin (1872) and William James (1884). Using graph theory metric and content analysis of titles and abstracts, we identified and characterized the contents of 69 research communities, their most influential articles, and their interconnectedness with each other. We further identified potential "missed connections" between communities that share similar content but do not have strong citation-based connections. In doing so, we establish the first, low-dimensional representation, or field-wide map, of a substantial portion of the affective sciences literature. This panoramic view of the field provides affective and non-affective scientists alike with the means to rapidly survey dozens of major research communities and topics in the field, guide scholarship development, and identify gaps and connections for developing an integrative science.