Culturomics is emerging as an important field within science, as a way to measure attitudes and beliefs and their dynamics across time and space via quantitative analysis of digitized data from literature, news, film, social media, and more. Sentiment analysis is a culturomics tool that, within the last decade, has provided a means to quantify the polarity of attitudes expressed within various media. Conservation science is a crisis discipline; therefore, accurate and effective communication are paramount. We investigated how conservation scientists communicate their findings through scientific journal articles. We analyzed 15,001 abstracts from articles published from 1998 to 2017 in 6 conservation-focused journals selected based on indexing in scientific databases. Articles were categorized by year, focal taxa, and the conservation status of the focal species. We calculated mean sentiment score for each abstract (mean adjusted z score) based on 4 lexicons (Jockers-Rinker, National Research Council, Bing, and AFINN). We found a significant positive annual trend in the sentiment scores of articles. We also observed a significant trend toward increasing negativity along the spectrum of conservation status categories (i.e., from least concern to extinct). There were some clear differences in the sentiments with which research on different taxa was reported, however. For example, abstracts mentioning lobe finned fishes tended to have high sentiment scores, which could be related to the rediscovery of the coelacanth driving a positive narrative. Contrastingly, abstracts mentioning elasmobranchs had low scores, possibly reflecting the negative sentiment score associated with the word shark. Sentiment analysis has applications in science, especially as it pertains to conservation psychology, and we suggest a new science-based lexicon be developed specifically for the field of conservation.

Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Hydrobiology Na Sádkách 702 7 37005 České Budějovice Czech Republic Faculty of Science Department of Ecosystem Biology University of South Bohemia Branišovská 31a 37005 České Budějovice Czech Republic

Department of Zoology University of Oxford 11a Mansfield Road Oxford OX1 3SZ U K Oxford Martin School University of Oxford 34 Broad Street Oxford OX1 3BD U K Institute for Conservation Research San Diego Zoo Global 15600 San Pasqual Valley Road Escondido CA 92027 U S A

Fish Ecology and Conservation Physiology Laboratory Carleton University Ottawa ON K1S 5B6 Canada

Insilicor Analytics 98 Caroline Avenue Ottawa ON K1Y 0S9 Canada

NORCE Norwegian Research Centre Laboratory for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries Nygårdsgaten 112 Bergen 5008 Norway

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