From: Graham Taylor <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 18:17:50 +0100

Text mining is the subject of considerable political debate, but what
is the practical reality for academic researchers? Our survey set out
to investigate the knowledge, views and experiences of researchers
with text mining of journal literature.

The survey results and a summary can be read on the PRC website:

publishingresearchconsortium.com

A growing number of papers refer to text mining techniques, but
represent less than 0.1% of the literature, so the impact so far is
quite small, and awareness of mining techniques is still relatively
low. However current users envisage the technique to hold great
promise, and two thirds of those not currently users are open to
evaluating text mining to apply to their research. The most appealing
application for non-users is automated systematic literature review,
but experienced users see the benefits in extracting information,
concepts and new facts. Views on the available infrastructure are
mixed, but there is more agreement than not that the current
infrastructure supports text mining in terms of software tools,
availability of sources, and institutional support. The technique is
not yet ‘plug and play’ and is perceived still to require programming
skills. It is viewed by many as still at an experimental phase.

We see this survey as a benchmark for further study, and to help
inform the current debate.

Graham Taylor
Convenor
Publishing Research Consortium