The Affective Science Network: A fieldwide map of over 1 Million citations

Research in affective science includes over one hundred thousand articles, the vast majority ofwhich have been published in only the past two decades. The size and rapid growth of this fieldhave led to unique challenges for the 21st-century scientist including how to develop both breadthand 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 bycompactly mapping out this enormous field using citation network analysis (CNA). Wegenerated a citation matrix of over 100,000 publications and over 1 million citations since theseminal works on emotion by Charles Darwin and William James. Using graph theory metricand content analysis of titles and abstracts, we identified and characterized the contents of 69research communities, their most influential articles, and their interconnectedness with eachother. We further identified potential “missed connections” between communities that sharesimilar content but do not have strong citation-based connections. In doing so, we establish thefirst, low-dimensional representation, or field-wide map, of a substantial portion of the affectivesciences literature. This panoramic view of the field provides affective and non-affectivescientists alike with the means to rapidly survey dozens of major research communities andtopics in the field, guide scholarship development, and identify gaps and connections fordeveloping an integrative science.