The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society
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The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869) Kun Sun1,2 · Haitao Liu2,3 · Wenxin Xiong4 Received: 22 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Scientific 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 sociocultural 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. Keywords Scientific discourse · Professionalization · Information discrimination · Semantic similarity · Full-text analysis
* Kun Sun kun.sun@uni‑tuebingen.de * Haitao Liu [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Scientometrics
Introduction Discerning the patterns of cultural evolution is obviously crucial to gaining a better understanding of both human nature and how the world has formed and changed (Shennan 2009). The evolution of specific cultural phenomena can be investigated quantitatively with the development of computational technology and by drawing on the increasing amount of digitalized materials (Carr et al. 2017; Hutchison et al. 2018). These studies have helped to establish a quantitative science of cultural change and have also provided insights into the evolutionary patterns in human culture. Science, which is an essential part of human culture and one of the most important factors in the maki
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