Quantitative corpus-based analysis of the chiropractic literature - a pilot study

Area of Science:

• Chiropractic research
• Linguistics
• Bibliometrics

Background:

• Understanding the specialized vocabulary of chiropractic literature is crucial for research and communication.
• Previous analyses have not comprehensively identified distinctive terms within the chiropractic academic domain.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify frequently occurring and distinctive words and phrases in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association.
• To compare chiropractic literature vocabulary against general English to highlight domain-specific terms.
• To assess the readability of peer-reviewed chiropractic publications.

Main Methods:

• Computerized analysis of a large corpus of peer-reviewed articles from the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association.
• Comparative analysis against a general English text corpus to identify over-represented terms.
• Calculation of readability statistics for the chiropractic literature.

Main Results:

• Nearly 2,500 words were identified as over-represented in the chiropractic literature, suggesting specialized importance.
• Readability of chiropractic literature is comparable to nursing, public health, and midwifery texts.
• Key professional terms such as "subluxation" and "adjustment" were not found to be highly prevalent.

Conclusions:

• The study identified a unique lexical profile for chiropractic literature, distinct from general English.
• The readability level indicates accessibility comparable to related health professions.
• The lower prevalence of certain expected terms warrants further investigation into professional communication and terminology.