Project Overview

Project overview

In order to ascertain the level of technicality in a discipline’s vocabulary, we first looked through a selection of journals and articles from various subjects that we felt to be representative of each discipline. We then amassed a database of words used in these articles and determined the technical words within each subject, and consequently each discipline. Following this, we determined the frequency that these words occur within articles outside their original subject, if any. We term this set of words a subject’s shared vocabulary.

In order to establish a subject’s impact in the academic world, we studied the citation metrics of the journals within that subject which we used. Specifically, we looked at their Impact Factor and h5 Index.

In our analysis, we proceeded to make connections between:

1. The % of technical words in an article (its level of technicality) and the article’s subject
2. A subject’s level of technicality and the size of its shared vocabulary
3. The size of a subject’s shared vocabulary and its impact in the academic world

and drew our conclusions in reference to our hypothesis.