{"id":773,"date":"2015-03-03T11:57:26","date_gmt":"2015-03-03T11:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/polsis.org\/?p=773"},"modified":"2015-03-03T11:57:26","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T11:57:26","slug":"a-corpus-based-analysis-of-ref-output-titles-for-politics-and-international-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/polsis\/2015\/03\/03\/a-corpus-based-analysis-of-ref-output-titles-for-politics-and-international-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"A Corpus-Based Analysis of REF Output Titles for Politics and International Studies*"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered what the titles of\u00a0outputs submitted to the REF tell us about disciplinary trends, foci and boundaries? Well, thanks to the wonder of corpus linguistics and\u00a0Laurence Anthony<\/span><\/a>\u2018s AntConc<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0wonder no longer.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
Dr Stephen Bates is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

T<\/em><\/strong>able 1<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>shows us a ranking of the 100 most popular words used in titles of work submitted to the 2014 REF and 2008 RAE\u00a0for the Politics &\u00a0International Studies panel**. \u00a0As can be seen and as would probably be expected, the same grammatical words<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the, and, of, in\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0a \u2013\u00a0<\/em>occupy the first five places in the same order for both rankings (s<\/em> is there because of \u2018apostrophe-S’; eu <\/em>is there because the method treats all data as lower case). After that, we can see the kinds of lexical words<\/span><\/span><\/a> that, again, we would probably expect to see in a list of popular words with political scientists and IR scholars. So, lots of titles have the words politics, political, policy, international, European, war, theory\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0power\u00a0<\/em>(including this little beauty<\/span><\/span><\/a>) in them. These lists are able to tell us a lot about the perennial concerns of the discipline but they aren\u2019t able to tell us very much about growing and declining areas of interest.<\/p>\n

Table 1: REF & RAE Politics Word Lists\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>(Sorry for the break in the middle of the table. I couldn\u2019t work out how to insert the whole table at once \u2013 the same goes for the other tables below).<\/p>\n

\"Politics<\/a> \"Politics<\/a><\/p>\n

Analysing (sub-)disciplinary trends\u00a0can be achieved through comparing\u00a0the word lists in Table 1\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>to produce rankings of keywords for both the 2014 REF and the 2008 RAE. These rankings\u00a0can be found in Table 2 <\/em><\/strong>which lists the top 100 keywords for each. Keywords are\u00a0words which are\u00a0unusually frequent, or infrequent, in one collection of words, or corpus, in comparison to another^.<\/p>\n

Table 2: REF & RAE Keyword Rankings<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Politics<\/a> \"Politics<\/a><\/p>\n

So, if we compare the keywords for the 2014 REF with the 2008 RAE, we find that Obama, financial, austerity\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0crisis\u00a0<\/em>are ranked highly. Again, this is what we would probably expect to see given the timing (and the importance) of the global financial crisis, austerity measures and the election of Barack Obama.\u00a0Yet, beyond these expected\u00a0keywords, these rankings can help us to identify some interesting \u2013 well, I think they\u2019re interesting \u2013 possible trends within the discipline:<\/p>\n