A keyword-driven approach to science

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the contextual associations of key scientific words across various fields, revealing how their meanings and relationships vary depending on the scientific domain, thus enhancing understanding of scientific language and concepts.

Contribution

It introduces a keyword-driven analysis method to explore how important scientific words are associated differently across disciplines, providing insights into interdisciplinary connections and language usage.

Findings

Biology is closely related to computer science through shared associations with databases.

Words like 'complex', 'model', and 'prediction' have multiple strong associations across fields.

Distinct associations of key words highlight the contextual variability in scientific language.

Abstract

To a good extent, words can be understood as corresponding to patterns or categories that appeared in order to represent concepts and structures that are particularly important or useful in a given time and space. Words are characterized by not being completely general nor specific, in the sense that the same word can be instantiated or related to several different contexts, depending on specific situations. Indeed, the way in which words are instantiated and associated represents a particularly interesting aspect that can substantially help to better understand the context in which they are employed. Scientific words are no exception to that. In the present work, we approach the associations between a set of particularly relevant words in the sense of being not only frequently used in several areas, but also representing concepts that are currently related to some of the main standing challenges in science. More specifically, the study reported here takes into account the words "prediction", "model", "optimization", "complex", "entropy", "random", "deterministic", "pattern", and "database". In order to complement the analysis, we also obtain a network representing the relationship between the adopted areas. Many interesting results were found. First and foremost, several of the words were observed to have markedly distinct associations in different areas. Biology was found to be related to computer science, sharing associations with databases. Furthermore, for most of the cases, the words "complex", "model", and "prediction" were observed to have several strong associations.