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Large-scale stylistic analysis of formality in academia and social media

Version 2 2024-06-05, 11:49
Version 1 2017-04-06, 12:03
conference contribution
posted on 2016-01-01, 00:00 authored by Thin NguyenThin Nguyen, Svetha VenkateshSvetha Venkatesh, Quoc-Dinh Phung
The dictum ‘publish or perish’ has influenced the way scientists present research results as to get published, including exaggeration and overstatement of research findings. This behavior emerges patterns of using language in academia. For example, recently it has been found that the proportion of positive words has risen in the content of scientific articles over the last 40 years, which probably shows the tendency in scientists to exaggerate and overstate their research results. The practice may deviate from impersonal and formal style of academic writing. In this study the degree of formality in scientific articles is investigated through a corpus of 14 million PubMed abstracts. Three aspects of stylistic features are explored: expressing emotional information, using first person pronouns to refer to the authors, and mixing English varieties. Trends of these stylistic features in scientific publications for the last four decades were discovered. A comparison on the emotional information with other online user-generated media, including online encyclopedias, web-logs, forums, and micro-blogs, was conducted. Advances in cluster computing are employed to process large scale data, with 5.8 terabytes and 3.6 billions of data points from all the media. The results suggest the potential of pattern recognition in data at scale.

History

Event

Fudan University. Conference (17th : 2016 : Shanghai, China)

Volume

LNCS 10042

Series

Fudan University Conference

Pagination

137 - 145

Publisher

Springer International

Location

Shanghai, China

Place of publication

Cham, Switzerland

Start date

2016-11-08

End date

2016-11-10

ISSN

0302-9743

eISSN

1611-3349

ISBN-13

9783319487427

Language

eng

Publication classification

E Conference publication; E1 Full written paper - refereed

Copyright notice

2016, Springer International Publishing AG

Editor/Contributor(s)

W Cellary, M Mokbel, J Wang, H Wang, R Zhou, Y Zhang

Title of proceedings

WISE 2016 : Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering