Distant Reader - journal-lancet-cord

Introduction

This is a Distant Reader "study carrel", a set of structured data intended to help the student, researcher, or scholar use & understand a corpus.

This study carrel was created on 2021-05-30 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader cord process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of CORD, a data set of scholarly articles on the topic of COVID-19. The actual query was: facet_journal:"Lancet". The results of this query were saved in a cache and transformed into a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against these plain text files. For example, a short narrative report has been created. This Web page is a more verbose version of that report.

All study carrels are self-contained -- no Internet connection is necessary to use them. Download this carrel for offline reading. The carrel is made up of many subdirectories and data files. The manifest describes each one in greater detail.

Size

There are 140 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 252,245 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 2,293 words long. If you dig deeper, then you might want to save yourself some time by reading a shorter item. On the other hand, if your desire is for more detail, then you might consider reading a longer item. The following charts illustrate the overall size of the carrel.

Readability

On a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very difficult and 100 is very easy, the documents have an average readability score of 50. Consequently, if you want to read something more simplistic, then consider a document with a higher score. If you want something more specialized, then consider something with a lower score. The following charts illustrate the overall readability of the carrel.

Word Frequencies

By merely counting & tabulating the frequency of individual words or phrases, you can begin to get an understanding of the carrel's "aboutness". Excluding "stop words", some of the more frequent words include:

health, patients, covid, sars, disease, virus, cov, risk, infection, care, respiratory, study, global, data, dementia, countries, people, coronavirus, clinical, human, public, influenza, also, severe, international, will, china, one, response, treatment, acute, cases, outbreak, might, vaccine, years, two, syndrome, patient, use, days, high, studies, evidence, mortality, hospital, control, analysis, medical, pandemic

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2020 report of the Lancet Commission, Will Ebola change the game? Ten essential reforms before the next pandemic. The report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, and China's distinctive engagement in global health.

The most frequent two-word phrases (bigrams) include:

public health, respiratory syndrome, acute respiratory, severe acute, global health, hong kong, infl uenza, doc id, lancet doi, cord uid, syndrome coronavirus, novel coronavirus, health care, risk factors, world health, international health, health systems, disease control, middle east, coronavirus disease, pregnant women, systematic review, infectious diseases, competing interests, health organization, east respiratory, health workers, intensive care, care workers, southeast asia, fi rst, chandipura virus, eff orts, health regulations, cognitive impairment, controlled trial, electron microscopy, national health, ebola virus, saudi arabia, cohort study, blood pressure, health emergency, cov infection, international concern, health services, fi gure, emergency room, respiratory tract, health security

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Will Ebola change the game? Ten essential reforms before the next pandemic. The report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola Health security in 2014: building on preparedness knowledge for emerging health threats, and MERS-CoV outbreak following a single patient exposure in an emergency room in South Korea: an epidemiological outbreak study.

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

Keywords

Sets of keywords -- statistically significant words -- can be enumerated by comparing the relative frequency of words with the number of times the words appear in an entire corpus. Some of the most statistically significant keywords in the carrel include:

covid-19, sars, health, patient, china, virus, hiv, vaccine, mers, h5n1, usa, hong, ebola, covid19, risk, respiratory, influenza, human, global, aids, africa, world, study, rna, pcr, outbreak, kong, infection, ihr, cov, country, chandipura, asia, arabia, zika, year, wuhan, worker, trump, thailand, tbi, structural, singapore, sex, sequence, science, saudi, rsv, rotavirus, remdesivir

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is another popular approach to connoting the aboutness of a corpus. If the study carrel could be summed up in a single word, then that word might be health, and AUSTRALIA ANTIGEN, CORONAVIRUS, AND REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE IN VIRAL HEPATITIS is most about that word.

If the study carrel could be summed up in three words ("topics") then those words and their significantly associated titles include:

If the study carrel could be summed up in five topics, and each topic were each denoted with three words, then those topics and their most significantly associated files would be:

patients, sars, virus - H5N1 infection of the respiratory tract and beyond: a molecular pathology study
health, countries, global - Health and health-care systems in southeast Asia: diversity and transitions
covid, health, china - The ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange
dementia, risk, people - Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2020 report of the Lancet Commission
influenza, hospital, human - REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of your study carrel's parts-of-speech, you are able to answer question beyonds aboutness. For example, a list of the most frequent nouns helps you answer what questions; "What is discussed in this collection?":

health, patients, virus, disease, infection, risk, care, data, people, countries, dementia, study, coronavirus, influenza, treatment, response, cases, outbreak, years, vaccine, syndrome, days, evidence, studies, mortality, analysis, time, population, pandemic, use, transmission, hospital, cells, case, infections, patient, control, pneumonia, viruses, community, children, age, samples, system, symptoms, development, diseases, research, authors, workers

An enumeration of the verbs helps you learn what actions take place in a text or what the things in the text do. Very frequently, the most common lemmatized verbs are "be", "have", and "do"; the more interesting verbs usually occur further down the list of frequencies:

including, used, showed, increases, develop, reported, needs, providing, based, associated, reduce, suggests, found, take, requiring, infected, made, leads, detected, give, cause, received, control, confirmed, identifying, related, support, compared, following, prevent, occurring, died, continue, working, remaining, become, improve, saw, declare, treated, test, emerging, established, considers, assessed, isolated, estimated, obtained, contribute, presented

Proper Nouns

An extraction of proper nouns helps you determine the names of people and places in your study carrel.

SARS, COVID-19, China, Health, CoV-2, CoV, Ebola, HIV, US, USA, Lancet, Africa, MERS, H5N1, PCR, UK, WHO, International, World, Hong, DOI, Asia, s0140, Kong, RNA, eff, fi, March, A, uenza, AIDS, Alzheimer, CI, Wuhan, nan, RT, National, Global, Commission, COVID19, May, sha, East, Disease, Organization, •, CDC, Middle, General, remdesivir

An analysis of personal pronouns enables you to answer at least two questions: 1) "What, if any, is the overall gender of my study carrel?", and 2) "To what degree are the texts in my study carrel self-centered versus inclusive?"

we, it, their, our, its, they, i, his, he, them, us, she, her, my, itself, themselves, one, your, you, me, him, rad5, ourselves, himself, s, ours, http://www.who.int)-have, gata1, covid-19, aflmp1

Below are words cloud of your study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

Adjectives & Verbs

Learning about a corpus's adjectives and adverbs helps you answer how questions: "How are things described and how are things done?" An analysis of adjectives and adverbs also points to a corpus's overall sentiment. "In general, is my study carrel positive or negative?"

respiratory, clinical, global, human, severe, public, acute, high, viral, international, medical, new, non, many, covid-19, social, important, economic, national, positive, early, infectious, cognitive, low, similar, key, first, specific, major, available, maternal, several, older, possible, mild, higher, novel, likely, effective, political, large, rapid, potential, different, primary, common, small, negative, chinese, systematic

also, however, well, even, now, often, particularly, therefore, still, rapidly, less, especially, highly, potentially, already, first, far, previously, rather, together, probably, yet, worldwide, mainly, later, moreover, additionally, finally, daily, furthermore, directly, currently, respectively, almost, globally, nearly, largely, clinically, relatively, recently, much, least, alone, substantially, similarly, perhaps, closely, significantly, newly, generally

Next steps

There is much more to a study carrel than the things outlined above. Use this page's menubar to navigate and explore in more detail. There you will find additional features & functions including: ngrams, parts-of-speech, grammars, named entities, topic modeling, a simple search interface, etc.

Again, study carrels are self-contained. Download this carrel for offline viewing and use.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.