Si Shen, Chuan Jiang, Haotian Hu, Youshu Ji and Dongbo Wang
Reorganising unstructured academic abstracts according to a certain logical structure can help scholars not only extract valid information quickly but also facilitate the faceted…
Abstract
Purpose
Reorganising unstructured academic abstracts according to a certain logical structure can help scholars not only extract valid information quickly but also facilitate the faceted search of academic literature. This study aims to build a high-performance model for identifying of the functional structures of unstructured abstracts in the social sciences.
Design/methodology/approach
This study first investigated the structuring of abstracts in academic articles in the field of social sciences, using large-scale statistical analyses. Then, the functional structures of sentences in the abstract in a corpus of more than 3.5 million abstracts were identified from sentence classification and sequence tagging by using several models based on either machine learning or a deep learning approach, and the results were compared.
Findings
The results demonstrate that the functional structures of sentences in abstracts in social science manuscripts include the background, purpose, methods, results and conclusions. The experimental results show that the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers exhibited the best performance, the overall F1 score of which was 86.23%.
Originality/value
The data set of annotated social science abstract is generated and corresponding models are trained on the basis of the data set, both of which are available on Github (https://github.com/Academic-Abstract-Knowledge-Mining/SSCI_Abstract_Structures_Identification). Based on the optimised model, a Web application for the identification of the functional structures of abstracts and their faceted search in social sciences was constructed to enable rapid and convenient reading, organisation and fine-grained retrieval of academic abstracts.
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Haotian Hu, Dongbo Wang and Sanhong Deng
The citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing…
Abstract
Purpose
The citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing styles of abstracts in papers and capture the characteristics of highly cited papers' abstracts.
Design/methodology/approach
This research selected 10,000 highly cited papers and 10,000 zero-cited papers from the WOS (2008-2017) database. The Coh-Metrix 3.0 textual cohesion analysis tool was used to quantify the 108 language features of highly cited and zero-cited paper abstracts. The differences of the indicators with significant differences were analyzed from four aspects: vocabulary, sentence, syntax and readability.
Findings
The abstracts of highly cited papers contain more complex and professional words, more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and personal pronouns, but fewer nouns and verbs. The sentences in the abstracts of highly cited papers are more complex and the sentence length is relatively longer. The syntactic structure in abstracts of highly cited papers is relatively more complex and syntactic similarities between sentences are fewer. Highly cited papers' abstracts are less readable than zero-cited papers' abstracts.
Originality/value
This study analyses the differences between the abstracts of highly cited and those of zero-cited papers, reveals the common external and deep semantic features of highly cited papers in abstract writing styles, provide suggestions for researchers on abstract writing. These findings can help increase the scientific impact of articles and improve the review efficiency as well as the researchers' abstract writing skills.
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The purpose of this paper is to describe how China’s approach to a nuclear North Korea has changed and find key variables that explain the changes.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe how China’s approach to a nuclear North Korea has changed and find key variables that explain the changes.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts the traditional qualitative method, referring to different types of reliable and authoritative Chinese and English scholars, books and articles.
Findings
Although China has accumulated distrust of North Korea and reprimanded the regime for its nuclear program, it has never ignored the strategic value or balance – especially vis-à-vis the USA – the neighboring country provides for it. And for that matter, it has been keen to prevent North Korea from bypassing it and getting closer to the USA. With this strategic calculation in mind, China has mostly made gestures in implementing the UN sanctions against North Korea, though not always.
Originality/value
This paper proves that China’s strategic calculation has been a constant key variable that explains its approach toward a nuclear North Korea since the inception of the issue in the early 1990s.