RANK ORDER PATTERNS OF COMMON WORDS AS DISCRIMINATORS OF SUBJECT CONTENT IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL PROSE
Everett M. Wallace · 1964
Fifty IRE abstracts in the field of electronic computers and fifty Psychological Abstracts were matched, one abstract at a time, one word type at a time, against two lists of words ranked in descending order of frequency as they occurred within two different sets of three hundred psychological and computer abstracts. All fully inflected forms of all function and content words were included in the rankings. Using the first 50 ranks only of the two lists, 93% of the abstracts were successfully discriminated. For the first 75 and 100 ranks, the success rates were 96% and 97%, respectively.