Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Smetana, Mason, Khazanovich, Lev
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16152
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917023961841664
author Smetana, Mason
Khazanovich, Lev
author_facet Smetana, Mason
Khazanovich, Lev
contents Scientific literature is increasingly siloed by complex language, static disciplinary structures, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it cumbersome to capture the dynamic nature of modern science. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an adaptable large language model (LLM)-driven framework to quantify thematic trends and map the evolving landscape of scientific knowledge. The approach is demonstrated over a 20-year collection of more than 1,500 engineering articles published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marked for their breadth and depth of research focus. A two-stage classification pipeline first establishes a primary thematic category for each article based on its abstract. The subsequent phase performs a full-text analysis to assign secondary classifications, revealing latent, cross-topic connections across the corpus. Traditional natural language processing (NLP) methods, such as Bag-of-Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), confirm the resulting topical structure and also suggest that standalone word-frequency analyses may be insufficient for mapping fields with high diversity. Finally, a disjoint graph representation between the primary and secondary classifications reveals implicit connections between themes that may be less apparent when analyzing abstracts or keywords alone. The findings show that the approach independently recovers much of the journal's editorially embedded structure without prior knowledge of its existing dual-classification schema (e.g., biological studies also classified as engineering). This framework offers a powerful tool for detecting potential thematic trends and providing a high-level overview of scientific progress.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16152
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Publication Trend Analysis and Synthesis via Large Language Model: A Case Study of Engineering in PNAS
Smetana, Mason
Khazanovich, Lev
Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Scientific literature is increasingly siloed by complex language, static disciplinary structures, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it cumbersome to capture the dynamic nature of modern science. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an adaptable large language model (LLM)-driven framework to quantify thematic trends and map the evolving landscape of scientific knowledge. The approach is demonstrated over a 20-year collection of more than 1,500 engineering articles published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marked for their breadth and depth of research focus. A two-stage classification pipeline first establishes a primary thematic category for each article based on its abstract. The subsequent phase performs a full-text analysis to assign secondary classifications, revealing latent, cross-topic connections across the corpus. Traditional natural language processing (NLP) methods, such as Bag-of-Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), confirm the resulting topical structure and also suggest that standalone word-frequency analyses may be insufficient for mapping fields with high diversity. Finally, a disjoint graph representation between the primary and secondary classifications reveals implicit connections between themes that may be less apparent when analyzing abstracts or keywords alone. The findings show that the approach independently recovers much of the journal's editorially embedded structure without prior knowledge of its existing dual-classification schema (e.g., biological studies also classified as engineering). This framework offers a powerful tool for detecting potential thematic trends and providing a high-level overview of scientific progress.
title Publication Trend Analysis and Synthesis via Large Language Model: A Case Study of Engineering in PNAS
topic Digital Libraries
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16152