What are the hot topics in philosophical dissertations since 2000?  Using the approximately 2,000 dissertation titles (excluding all “Unknown” dissertations) I had collected for other analyses, I separated out each word in a single title and put it into a column with all of the words from other titles.  The combined result was approximately 16,500 individual words (so about 5 words per title), and of those, about 3,400 distinct words.  After removing common and uninteresting words like “the” and “and”, I found how many times each word was used in this collection of dissertation title words. (Note: I did not correct for misspellings.  The words are as I found them in the placement records.)

Which words were the most popular? 

In first, the word “Theory” was used 177 times, meaning that 9% of dissertation titles used this word.  In second, “Philosophy” was used 98 times.  And in third, “Ethics” was used 76 times.  Here are the top 100 results.

Which word pairings/trios were the most popular?

It had been suggested to me that I should look at word clusters, that is, which words appear together often, in the dissertation titles.  These will be more revealing of the topic being discussed in the dissertation.  Once again, I split up each of the words in a dissertation title, but I kept track of which were associated with a specific dissertation.  Then I matched each word with every other word in the same dissertation and then found the most common pairings and trios.  Below are the approximately 180 most common and interesting pairings I found (counts > 3) and the 2 interesting trios (counts > 3) (Note: I have tried to get rid of repeats, but I may have missed some):

Pairs:

Trios:

After controlling for dissertation titles that used the same word multiple times in their title (e.g., “Military”), I only found 2 trios that were used more than 3 times in separate dissertations.  But perhaps someone else can find more…

 

Which words were the Most Unusual/Surprising?

Which words/topics would it be surprising to find in a dissertation title?  Here are some that I found which jumped out at me and which were used more than once:

What do you notice?

Click below to download the full dataset of dissertation titles (approximately 2,000). Please post in the comments below anything interesting that you find in the dataset.  Thanks!

DissertationTitles.csv (122.14 kb)