17.3131, Qs: Software for Contrasting Two Corpora of Papers

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-3131. Wed Oct 25 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.3131, Qs: Software for Contrasting Two Corpora of Papers

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===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 23-Oct-2006
From: Erick Turner < turnere at ohsu.edu >
Subject: Software for Contrasting Two Corpora of Papers 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:57:28
From: Erick Turner < turnere at ohsu.edu >
Subject: Software for Contrasting Two Corpora of Papers 
 


I am interested in the topic of publication bias in the medical literature.
I have two groups of journal articles, one in which the results are
reported accurately and another in which the results have been 'spun'. 

(By that I mean that they started out with one hypothesis, found that to be
not statistically significant, so they reported on a post hoc endpoint that
happened to be to be significant, and wrote it up as if that was the
original hypothesis. (This has been dubbed HARKing, for hypothesizing after
the results are known.)

I am interested in contrasting the spun with the 'unspun' articles to look
for differences between them. I am thinking that some words or phrases
might turn out to be hidden signals for spin.

To that end, I am wondering what software folks would recommend to handle
this best.

It could be on either the Mac or PC platform, with some preference for the
former, and a not-too-steep learning curve would also be preferred, but any
suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks.

Erick 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics




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