Researchers' investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts' rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while "not, no," and "little" tend to be the commonly used negative markers in "Science" abstracts, "little" increased diachronically but decreased for "not" and "no." Functionally, writers prefer to use "interactive negations" and employ relatively more negative markers that function as "consequence" (interactive dimension) and "hedging" (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.