Changing word meanings in biomedical literature reveal pandemics and new technologies.

ABSTRACT: While we often think of words as having a fixed meaning that we use to describe a changing world, words are also dynamic and changing. Scientific research can also be remarkably fast-moving, with new concepts or approaches rapidly gaining mind share. We examined scientific writing, both preprint and pre-publication peer-reviewed text, to identify terms that have changed and examine their use. One particular challenge that we faced was that the shift from closed to open access publishing meant that the size of available corpora changed by over an order of magnitude in the last two decades. We developed an approach to evaluate semantic shift by accounting for both intra- and inter-year variability using multiple integrated models. This analysis revealed thousands of change points in both cor

SUBMITTER: Nicholson DN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10161184 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature