The representation of argumentation in scientific papers: A comparative analysis of two research areas

Abstract

Scientific papers are essential manifestations of evolving scientific knowledge, and arguments are an important avenue to communicate research results. This study aims to understand how the argumentation process is represented in scientific papers, which is important for knowledge representation, discovery, and retrieval. First, based on fundamental argument theory and scientific discourse ontologies, a coding schema, including 17 categories was constructed. Thereafter, annotation experiments were conducted with 40 scientific articles randomly selected from two different research areas (library and information science and biomedical sciences). Statistical analysis and the sequential pattern mining method were then employed; the ratio of different argumentation units and evidence types were calculated, the argumentation semantics of figures and tables analyzed, and the argumentation structures extracted. A correlation analysis between argumentation and rhetorical structures was also performed to further reveal how argumentation was represented within scientific discourses. The results indicated a difference in the proportion of the argumentation units in the two types of scientific papers, as well as a similar linear construction with differences in the specific argument structures of each knowledge domain and a clear correlation between argumentation and rhetorical structure.Scientific papers are the most essential manifestations of evolving scientific knowledge, and argumentation is an important avenue through which research results are communicated (Walton & Zhang, 2013). Scientific discovery challenges existing theoretical analyses and empirical studies in a process of continuous argumentation; thus, argumentation forms the foundation of scientific papers, and articles demonstrating a rigorous argumentation process are essential for scientific development. Meanwhile, the "argumentation units" (along with the argumentation structure within a scientific paper) are a special implicit knowledge entity that represents the attribute of knowledge.Argumentation plays a critical role in identifying relevant arguments based on their content; thus, it seems reasonable to focus on identifying characteristic patterns of argumentation and the ways in which they are typically developed (Song et al., 2014). Revealing, extracting, and analyzing the argumentation structure of scientific papers plays an important role in interpreting the general rules of their content composition and benefits knowledge discovery, representation, retrieval, and ultimately access. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how argumentation is represented within scientific papers and to identify argument structures when they are extended to whole text segments (Walton, 2013;Walton et al., 2008).Recent research has placed particular emphasis on the definition, description, and representation of scientific content from the semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Several ontologies, such as the document element

The barriers and informational needs of students and junior researchers when reading scientific papers

“…They expect that the relevant content can be mainly presented in textual form or embedded in the page. As the social sciences are also influenced by the natural sciences (von Hayek, 2010), the paper content and structure needs have significant similarities with students and junior researchers in science, engineering, and medical science (Wang et al, 2021). Therefore, the most significant barriers they encountered were unclear terminology and accessing relevant literature, experimental data, and experimental procedures.…”

Usability evaluation of two new presentation modes of scientific articles for academic reading

“…Genre knowledge helps readers instantly recognize what a document means and what it is used for, while argument knowledge enables readers to recognize how the authors justify their findings. Several studies have analyzed the genre or argument structure of some parts of scientific articles-Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion(IMRD), such as writing guide in the field of Linguistics (Swales, 1990;Roe and Den Ouden, 2003;Olaniyan, 2014;Kanoksilapatham, 2015;Pessoa et al, 2018) and automatic information extraction in the field of Computer science (Teufel et al, 1999;Clark et al, 2014;Green, 2015;Wang et al, 2021). However, very few studies have exploited the genre structure and argument structure to design the presentation interfaces of scientific articles to meet various reading needs.…”