An analytical study of content and context of keywords on physics

Abstract

This paper is based on the analysis of author-assigned and title keywords and their constituent component words collected from 769 articles published in the journal Low Temperature Physics since the year 2006 to 2010. The total number of distinct keywords is 1155 of which 869 are single keywords having total frequency of occurrence of 2287. The single keywords have been categorized in four broad classes, viz. eponymous word, form word, acronym and semantic word. A semantic word bears several contexts and thus it may be considered as relevant in several other subject areas. The probable subject areas have been found with the aid of two popular online reference tools. The semantic words are further categorized in twelve classes according to their contexts. Some parameters have been defined on the basis of associations among the words and formation of keywords in consequence, i.e. Word Association Density, Word Association Coefficient and Keyword Formation Density. The values of these parameters have been observed for different word categories. The statistics of word association tending keyword formation would be known from this study. The allied subject domains also become predictable from this study.