Language and Persuasion Research: A Computational Literature Review Spanning Five Decades of Scholarship (1974–2025)
TL;DR
Three additional findings are identified: (1) the field has maintained relatively stable theoretical coherence, (2) papers that focus more on content analysis research receive fewer citations, and (3) the application of certain theoretical principles has declined over time, with researchers potentially citing underlying theories ritualistically versus meaningfully.
Abstract
In this paper, we examined five decades of language and persuasion research from an expert‐curated list of seminal works in the field. We evaluated the most dominant themes in this literature ( N = 1886 papers), searching for time‐related (e.g., themes that go in and out of style), impact‐related (e.g., themes that associate with citation rates), and authorship‐related trends (e.g., interdisciplinarity). The most prevalent themes were framing (64.5% of papers), content analysis (51.9%), and social media (50.1%) in language and persuasion research. Our computational literature review identified three additional findings: (1) the field has maintained relatively stable theoretical coherence, (2) papers that focus more on content analysis research receive fewer citations, and (3) the application of certain theoretical principles (e.g., argument quality) has declined over time, with researchers potentially citing underlying theories ritualistically versus meaningfully. Implications for language and persuasion research are discussed.