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The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869)
AbstractScientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.
- University of Tübingen Germany
Microsoft Academic Graph classification: History Scientometrics Concreteness Professionalization Epistemology Scientific discourse Scientific culture Semantic similarity Argument Specialization (logic)
General Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences, Computer Science Applications
General Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences, Computer Science Applications
Microsoft Academic Graph classification: History Scientometrics Concreteness Professionalization Epistemology Scientific discourse Scientific culture Semantic similarity Argument Specialization (logic)
citations This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).5 popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.Top 10% influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).Average impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.Average visibility views 19 download downloads 37 citations This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).5 popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.Top 10% influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).Average impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.Average Powered byBIP!- 19views37downloads