RLetters: A Web-Based Application for Text Analysis of Journal Articles

Abstract

While textual analysis of the journal literature is a burgeoning field, there is still a profound lack of user-friendly software for accomplishing this task. RLetters is a free, open-source web application which provides researchers with an environment in which they can select sets of journal articles and analyze them with cutting-edge textual analysis tools. RLetters allows users without prior expertise in textual analysis to analyze word frequency, collocations, cooccurrences, term networks, and more. It is implemented in Ruby and scripts are provided to automate deployment.

Digital Literature Analysis for Empirical Philosophy of Science

“…This sort of picture, again, comes with both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the consistent focus on operationalization of linguistic hypotheses as claims about corpora is welcome in a digital humanities context, within which we can imagine directly implementing ways to test claims about the meanings of scientific concepts within dedicated systems of text analysis (such as Pence [2016]). On the other hand, such freedom comes with a significant price, as developing such operationalizable hypotheses about scientific concepts will by no means be a simple endeavor.…”

A survey on scholarly data: From big data perspective

“…Research management entails a broad range of applications that are developed with the objective to facilitate research and reduce the time that researchers and scholars spend on unproductive activities by adding an element of automation in standard research guidelines and procedures. One of the best examples of a tool created for research management is RLetters [58]. This tool analyzes text inputted to it for several kinds of textual analysis like keyword co-occurrence and collocation analysis.…”