An analytical study of content and contexts of keywords on physics

TL;DR

This study analyzes the structure and context of keywords in physics articles to understand their composition, categorization, and the related subject domains over a five-year period.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed categorization and parameterization of keywords, revealing their associations and potential subject domains in physics literature.

Findings

1155 distinct keywords identified

Semantic words categorized into 12 context classes

Parameters like Word Association Density defined

Abstract

This paper analysed author-assigned and title keywords into constituent words collected from 769 articles published in the journal Low Temperature Physics since the year 2006 to 2010. The total number of distinct keywords over the said time span has been found as 1155, which have been analyzed into 869 numbers of single words having total frequency of occurrence of 2287. The single words obtained from keywords have been categorized in four broad classes, viz. eponymous word, form word, acronym and semantic word. A semantic word bears several contexts and thus may be considered as relevant in several other subject areas. These probable relevant subject areas have been found with the aid of two popular online reference tools. The semantic words are further categorized in twelve classes according to their contexts. Some parameters have been defined on the basis of associations among the words and formation of keywords in consequence, i.e. Word Association Density, Word Association Coefficient and Keyword Formation Density. The values of these parameters have been observed for different word categories. The statistics of word association tending keyword formation would be known from this study. The allied subject domains also become predictable from this study.