ArticlePloS one2015
Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Who "Feels Sexy" in the Google Books Corpus? Text-Mining Evidence for Gender Differences in Object of Desire Self-Consciousness.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Towards an estimate of the impact of censorship on biomedical literature.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025Article
- Semantic Representations Are Updated Across the Lifespan Reflecting Diachronic Language Change.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- The rising entropy of English in the attention economy.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Mechanisms upholding the persistence of stigma across 100 years of historical text.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- How cognitive selection affects language change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- Multi-LEX: A database of multi-word frequencies for French and English.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods.Affective science · 2023Article
- Expansion and evolution of the R programming language.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Benford's Law applies to word frequency rank in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.PloS one · 2023Article
- Diachronic semantic change in language is constrained by how people use and learn language.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Historical representations of social groups across 200 years of word embeddings from Google Books.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Using big data to track major shifts in human cognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- HerbKG: Constructing a Herbal-Molecular Medicine Knowledge Graph Using a Two-Stage Framework Based on Deep Transfer Learning.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- The rise and fall of rationality in language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900 s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800-2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.
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