Corpus linguistics for meta-research: a case study in obesity neuroscience

Corpus linguistics is a discipline concerned with the quantitative linguistic analyses of large collections of text data, called corpora. These analyses provide a repeatable method for identifying broad trends in a given genre of writing that a corpus represents (McEnery & Brezina, 2022). For example, the British National Corpus is used to identify trends in both written and spoken language amongst the British public. Corpus linguistics is also commonly deployed in language-learning contexts (Lei & Liu, 2016). However, the use of corpus linguistics as a tool to aid meta-research investigations remains under-appreciated (Wang et al., 2022).

This presentation provides one of the first analyses of a corpus of full-text journal articles. The Neurobesity corpus consists of 200 open-access obesity-related articles from neuroscience journals with the largest Altmetric scores for engagement. The corpus has been analysed in the open-source software #lancsbox v.6.0 (Brezina et al., 2015, 2020) to identify the predominate ways in which influential neuroscience research frames obesity pathogenesis. The major findings will be presented to highlight the power of corpus linguistics as a meta-research tool, as well as provide broader methodological insights from this novel method application.

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Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2020). #lancsBox v.6.0 [software]. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox
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