High-frequency collocations of nouns in research articles across eight disciplines

Abstract

This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the distribution of the highfrequency collocates of abstract nouns in 320 research articles across eight disciplines: Chemistry, Computer Science, Materials Science, Neuroscience, Economics, Language and Linguistics, Management, and Psychology. Disciplinary variation was also examined � very little previous research seems to have investigated this. The corpus was analysed using WordSmith Tools. The 16 highest-frequency nouns across all eight disciplines were identified, followed by the highest-frequency collocates for each noun. Five disciplines showed over 50% variance from the overall results. Conclusions are that the differing patterns revealed are disciplinary norms and represent standard terminology within the disciplines arising from the topics discussed, research methods, and content of discussions. It is also concluded that the collocations are an important part of the meanings and functions of the nouns, and that this evidence of sharp discipline differences underlines the importance of discipline-specific collocation research.