Do negative citations reduce the impact of cited papers?

Citation is an important process of scientific activities, reflecting the inheritance and development of knowledge. However, citations representing different sentiment polarities function differently in knowledge construction, especially negative citations holding critical views, which deserve more in-depth study. This paper selected papers on SVM from 1995 to 2020, and used the stratified random sampling method to obtain 3,337 citation sentences from 46,157 citations, coding several attributes such as citation polarity, to analyze the relationship between negative citation and the impact of cited paper and the role of negative citation in the development of SVM technology. The results of the study found that negative citations do not reduce the literature impact; papers with a certain negative citation ratio would have a higher impact; and the impact of those partially dismissed papers would be even higher. In addition, negative citation presents different characteristics in different periods of the development of SVM, which has a certain promotion effect on the improvement of this technology.