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Understanding disciplinary vocabularies using a full-text enabled domain-independent term extraction approach

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  • Erjia Yan
  • Jake Williams
  • Zheng Chen

Abstract

Publication metadata help deliver rich analyses of scholarly communication. However, research concepts and ideas are more effectively expressed through unstructured fields such as full texts. Thus, the goals of this paper are to employ a full-text enabled method to extract terms relevant to disciplinary vocabularies, and through them, to understand the relationships between disciplines. This paper uses an efficient, domain-independent term extraction method to extract disciplinary vocabularies from a large multidisciplinary corpus of PLoS ONE publications. It finds a power-law pattern in the frequency distributions of terms present in each discipline, indicating a semantic richness potentially sufficient for further study and advanced analysis. The salient relationships amongst these vocabularies become apparent in application of a principal component analysis. For example, Mathematics and Computer and Information Sciences were found to have similar vocabulary use patterns along with Engineering and Physics; while Chemistry and the Social Sciences were found to exhibit contrasting vocabulary use patterns along with the Earth Sciences and Chemistry. These results have implications to studies of scholarly communication as scholars attempt to identify the epistemological cultures of disciplines, and as a full text-based methodology could lead to machine learning applications in the automated classification of scholarly work according to disciplinary vocabularies.

Suggested Citation

  • Erjia Yan & Jake Williams & Zheng Chen, 2017. "Understanding disciplinary vocabularies using a full-text enabled domain-independent term extraction approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(11), pages 1-16, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0187762
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187762
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Chaomei Chen, 2006. "CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(3), pages 359-377, February.
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    3. Graeme Hirst, 1978. "Discipline impact factors: A method for determining core journal lists," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 29(4), pages 171-172, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Xiaoguang Wang & Hongyu Wang & Han Huang, 2021. "Evolutionary exploration and comparative analysis of the research topic networks in information disciplines," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4991-5017, June.

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