scholarly journals A structural topic model approach to scientific reorientation of economics and chemistry after German reunification

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (2) ◽  
pp. 1229-1251
Author(s):  
Andreas Rehs

AbstractThe detection of differences or similarities in large numbers of scientific publications is an open problem in scientometric research. In this paper we therefore develop and apply a machine learning approach based on structural topic modelling in combination with cosine similarity and a linear regression framework in order to identify differences in dissertation titles written at East and West German universities before and after German reunification. German reunification and its surrounding time period is used because it provides a structure with both minor and major differences in research topics that could be detected by our approach. Our dataset is based on dissertation titles in economics and business administration and chemistry from 1980 to 2010. We use university affiliation and year of the dissertation to train a structural topic model and then test the model on a set of unseen dissertation titles. Subsequently, we compare the resulting topic distribution of each title to every other title with cosine similarity. The cosine similarities and the regional and temporal origin of the dissertation titles they come from are then used in a linear regression approach. Our results on research topics in economics and business administration suggest substantial differences between East and West Germany before the reunification and a rapid conformation thereafter. In chemistry we observe minor differences between East and West before the reunification and a slightly increased similarity thereafter.

Author(s):  
Xiwen Bai ◽  
Xiunian Zhang ◽  
Kevin X. Li ◽  
Yaoming Zhou ◽  
Kum Fai Yuen

2022 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jianzu Wu ◽  
Kunxin Zhang

This article examines the policy implementation literature using a text mining technique, known as a structural topic model (STM), to conduct a comprehensive analysis of 547 articles published by 11 major journals between 2000 and 2019. The subject analyzed was the policy implementation literature, and the search included titles, keywords, and abstracts. The application of the STM not only allowed us to provide snapshots of different research topics and variation across covariates but also let us track the evolution and influence of topics over time. Examining the policy implementation literature has contributed to the understanding of public policy areas; the authors also provided recommendations for future studies in policy implementation.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (11) ◽  
pp. 1918-1936 ◽  
Author(s):  
WOLFGANG IHLE ◽  
GÚUNTER ESSER ◽  
MARTIN H. SCHMIDT ◽  
BERND BLANZ ◽  
OLAF REIS ◽  
...  

In this article, the authors present data from two longitudinal studies starting long before German reunification in East and West Germany. After unification, 533 twenty-five-year-olds and their parents were interviewed about mental health status, experience of life events and difficulties, and social support. The findings show that (a) externalizing disorders were more common in West Germany, whereas internalizing disorders were more common in East Germany; (b) there was a generation-specific differential course of disorders in East Germany after unification; and (c) the detrimental effect of life events and chronic difficulties on mental health could be weakened by kin and nonkin social support.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 191-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jooyeon Kim ◽  
Dongwoo Kim ◽  
Alice Oh

Much of scientific progress stems from previously published findings, but searching through the vast sea of scientific publications is difficult. We often rely on metrics of scholarly authority to find the prominent authors but these authority indices do not differentiate authority based on research topics. We present Latent Topical-Authority Indexing (LTAI) for jointly modeling the topics, citations, and topical authority in a corpus of academic papers. Compared to previous models, LTAI differs in two main aspects. First, it explicitly models the generative process of the citations, rather than treating the citations as given. Second, it models each author’s influence on citations of a paper based on the topics of the cited papers, as well as the citing papers. We fit LTAI into four academic corpora: CORA, Arxiv Physics, PNAS, and Citeseer. We compare the performance of LTAI against various baselines, starting with the latent Dirichlet allocation, to the more advanced models including author-link topic model and dynamic author citation topic model. The results show that LTAI achieves improved accuracy over other similar models when predicting words, citations and authors of publications.


1998 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-376
Author(s):  
Schäfer ◽  
Krämer ◽  
Vieluf ◽  
Behrendt ◽  
Ring

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Katja Corcoran ◽  
Michael Häfner ◽  
Mathias Kauff ◽  
Stefan Stürmer

Abstract. In this article, we reflect on 50 years of the journal Social Psychology. We interviewed colleagues who have witnessed the history of the journal. Based on these interviews, we identified three crucial periods in Social Psychology’s history, that are (a) the early development and further professionalization of the journal, (b) the reunification of East and West Germany, and (c) the internationalization of the journal and its transformation from the Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie to Social Psychology. We end our reflection with a discussion of changes that occurred during these periods and their implication for the future of our field.


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