Distant Reader - journal-lancetInfectDis-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 Infect Dis". 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 48 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 29,131 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 2,427 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 48. 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:

patients, cov, sars, infection, health, virus, respiratory, coronavirus, covid, disease, human, mers, viral, study, infl, cases, uenza, clinical, treatment, severe, care, transmission, syndrome, acute, associated, influenza, viruses, symptoms, risk, days, infections, rotavirus, data, also, vaccine, antibody, response, infected, public, infectious, control, workers, two, use, outbreak, testing, diseases, responses, group, high

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Monitoring approaches for health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, The scientific and ethical feasibility of immunity passports, and Serology testing in the COVID-19 pandemic response.

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

infl uenza, respiratory syndrome, acute respiratory, severe acute, public health, syndrome coronavirus, viral load, care workers, middle east, infectious diseases, hong kong, east respiratory, symptom onset, novel coronavirus, avian infl, respiratory tract, cell responses, cov infection, diff erent, antibody responses, avian influenza, immunity passports, rotavirus infection, sars coronavirus, coronavirus disease, human coronavirus, human beings, nitazoxanide mg, uenza virus, infect dis, lancet infect, doc id, cord uid, dis doi, coronavirus infection, infection control, eff ective, dromedary camels, infectious disease, saudi arabia, fi gure, spike protein, clinical trials, fi rst, pcr testing, immune response, eff ects, influenza virus, contact tracing, treatment group

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The emergence of influenza A H7N9 in human beings 16 years after influenza A H5N1: a tale of two cities Emerging novel and antimicrobial-resistant respiratory tract infections: new drug development and therapeutic options, and Effect of nitazoxanide in adults and adolescents with acute uncomplicated influenza: a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 2b/3 trial.

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:

sars, mers, covid-19, patient, virus, uenza, infl, hong, health, east, disease, viral, risk, pcr, middle, infection, h5n1, covid19, cov, china, care, vaccine, urti, treatment, toll, test, symptom, sponge, shenzhen, serological, saudi, rotavirus, rna, respiratory, receptor, product, polymorphism, poc, pilgrim, pheic, passport, passenger, oc43, nitazoxanide, nasal, mic, mecca, marine, malaria, load

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 patients, and When does a major outbreak become a Public Health Emergency of International Concern? 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, infection - Emergence of medicine for mass gatherings: lessons from the Hajj
cov, health, infection - Innate immunogenetics: a tool for exploring new frontiers of host defence
virus, sars, infl - Confronting the avian influenza threat: vaccine development for a potential pandemic
mers, cov, cell - T-cell responses to MERS coronavirus infection in people with occupational exposure to dromedary camels in Nigeria: an observational cohort study
transmission, disease, covid - Guidelines, law, and governance: disconnects in the global control of airline-associated infectious diseases

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?":

patients, infection, virus, health, coronavirus, disease, cases, study, treatment, care, transmission, syndrome, symptoms, viruses, influenza, days, risk, infections, data, vaccine, antibody, workers, infl, outbreak, response, responses, use, samples, testing, cell, studies, time, people, diseases, group, control, children, case, immunity, individuals, vaccines, symptom, contact, pandemic, analysis, blood, measures, fever, evidence, onset

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:

done, used, associated, including, show, reporting, infect, caused, identified, suggesting, increase, provide, needing, based, detected, develop, tested, reduce, required, isolated, found, related, assess, occurs, emerging, compared, confirmed, taken, induced, given, remain, neutralising, controlled, containing, lead, makes, followed, treating, improve, estimated, described, resulting, obtained, receive, exposed, considered, became, involves, generated, binding

Proper Nouns

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

SARS, MERS, CoV-2, CoV, COVID-19, uenza, China, PCR, H5N1, A, Middle, Hong, East, H7N9, Hajj, RNA, Kong, eff, RT, Health, infl, fi, Africa, diff, H1N1, nitazoxanide, Lancet, CI, mg, •, USA, Singapore, Feb, Saudi, sera, US, C, Ebola, Arabia, haemagglutinin, Wuhan, T, IgG, Jan, IgM, B, gure, fl, CT, ective

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, their, our, it, they, its, them, i, his, he, themselves, us, itself, you, her, my, him, she, one, your, rad5, mg, herself, duck/

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, human, viral, clinical, severe, acute, infectious, public, high, avian, new, positive, novel, rotavirus, available, immune, common, global, important, rapid, many, early, several, negative, potential, non, serological, low, antiviral, like, asymptomatic, specific, similar, anti, possible, lower, large, international, first, mild, infected, likely, epidemiological, effective, genetic, higher, close, resistant, medical, natural

also, however, highly, even, well, therefore, particularly, often, less, still, previously, potentially, rapidly, especially, probably, usually, furthermore, clinically, significantly, least, far, yet, already, rather, generally, now, frequently, worldwide, much, closely, first, critically, together, substantially, nt, later, alone, currently, recently, notably, hence, respectively, clearly, relatively, widely, subsequently, otherwise, long, daily, urgently

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.