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Persuasion in Specialized Discourse: A multidisciplinary perspective
Edited by Chiara Degano, Dora Renna and Francesca Santulli
[Argumentation in Context 22] 2024
► pp. 24–45

Chapter 1
Plural conversations about argumentation

A bibliometric and corpus analysis

| Institute of Communication and Public Policy, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
| Institute of Communication and Public Policy, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland
| Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

Argumentation studies are an area of inquiry with important interdisciplinary appeal. As such, the word argumentation is used in communities with diverse perspectives and approaches. In this work we apply bibliometric and corpus analysis to identify the semantic content of the “scientific conversations” about argumentation on dataset containing 10,000 scientific publications. We focus on outlets of publication of those documents to map the cognitive structure of the field and use results as a seed for linguistic analysis of discourse about argumentation of documents’ full text relevant for each cluster. Our findings show a small common core, that however branches into distinct discussions about argumentation. Understanding these points of connections and separations is important for the field and for the science in general, as they highlight mechanisms of interdisciplinarity and reveal possibilities for future interactions and developments.

Keywords: argumentation studies, bibliometric analysis, corpus analysis, interdisciplinarity, semantic content
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A bibliometric overview of the field
    • 2.1Identifying subdomains through source co-citations
    • 2.2An analysis of subfields
  • 3.Analyzing the discourse on argumentation
    • 3.1Statistical keywords in co-citation clusters
    • 3.2Collocations of argumentation and argument across co-citation clusters
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • References
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