Naming clusters in visualization studies: Parsing and filtering of noun phrases from citation contexts.

The present study presents a semi-automatic method for parsing and filtering of noun phrases from citation contexts. The purpose of the method is to extract contextual, agreed upon, and pertinent noun phrases, to be used in visualization studies for naming clusters (concept groups) or concept symbols. The method is applied in a case study, which forms part of a larger dissertation work concerning the applicability of bibliometric methods for thesaurus construction. The case study is carried out within periodontology, a specialty area of dentistry. The result of the case study indicates that the method is able to identify highly important noun phrases, and that these phrases accurately describe their parent clusters. Hence, the method is able to reduce the labour intensive work of manual citation context analysis, though further refinements are still needed.