Making a Scientific Research Article Word List (original) (raw)

This study created the Scientific Research Article Word List (SRAWL) out of the titles and abstracts of scientific research articles. The purpose of the list is to show scientists who are not native speakers of English what words they need to learn in order to handle scientific research articles in English. When scientists are determining whether or not a research article is worth reading, they look at the title first and then the abstract. Therefore, it is helpful if they learn words that are frequently used in these two parts. In order to make a list of such words, the titles and abstracts of 12,968 research articles and reports, published in Science between 2000 and 2016, were collected to create a corpus of 1.7 million words. Lexical coverage and word frequency were then investigated. The most frequent 7,850 lemmas appeared 13 times or more in the corpus and accounted for 94.75% of the total tokens. By excluding proper nouns, marginal words, and abbreviations from them, a list of 6,947 lemmas was created. The list was divided into four sublists according to the degrees of importance so that users will know which groups of words are more important than others. Scientists need to read scientific research articles in English in order to keep up with the latest developments in their fields, even if their first language is not English, as the vast majority of such articles are published in English. At the same time, scientists are busy people, and so they have to be selective in choosing which articles to read. When they are deciding whether or not to read an article, they look at the title first. If they find it interesting and relevant to their needs,