Word cloud analysis of the BJGP: 5 years on

Abstract

A ‘word cloud’ is a visual representation of word frequency derived from written text.1 The more often the word appears within the passage being analysed, the larger it appears in the image generated. This provides viewers with a synopsis of the main themes contained within the text.2 Word clouds are increasingly being used within the public and private sector as a tool to identify the focus of written material. As research tools, however, word clouds have a number of limitations. They fail to group words that have the same or similar meaning, for example, ‘GP’ and ‘GPs’ or ‘Practice’ and ‘practice’.3 In addition, the words are retrieved out of context as the technique omits the semantics of the words, as well as the phrases they comprise.2 Back in 2012, I conducted a word cloud analysis of the entire content of the British Journal of General Practice ( BJGP ) from 2011 using the online programme Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/).1 A maximum word limit of 100 was set. Common English words were removed. Five years on, I decided to repeat this exercise to measure the 2016 journal content against …

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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.