The method begins with an initial search of seven "core" keywords, in this case I chose 1) physics, 2) chemistry, 3) biology, 4) geology, 5) engineering, 6) military, and 7) social. My choice of these seven was based on a manual review of article field categories. An entirely different set of 7 or any number of "core words" is worth much exploration. The next step consists of collecting all the keywords in all the articles that contained a "core" keyword. In other words, first I searched on "physics", collected all of the keywords in all the articles with abstracts containing the word "physics", and did a word frequency count of those words. I did the same thing with the other six "core" keywords. This results in a "core keyword vector" of 7 columns and several thousand rows. This file can be downloaded here. Note that there are many words in common among the 7 core word vectors. It will be an interesting process to refine the columns, or choose different "core" keywords, etc.

I have created a form (send a request to access it) allowing the user to enter from 1 to 3 search terms which creates a database query returning all articles containing each of the 1 to 3 terms (using an AND search, not an OR search to keep the results small). I then "dot" the abstracts for each of the returned articles with the seven "core word vectors" to measure the extent to which the article falls into the 7 "core" keyword categories. I then render the resulting objects in 3d space where the xyz axes represent one of two possible "topic spaces". For the first topic space, the x axis represents the "physics-like" properties of the article, the y axis measures the "chemistry-like" nature of the article, and the z axis measures the "biology-like" nature of the article. For the second topic space, the x axis represents the "engineering-like" properties of the article, the y axis measures the "military-like" nature of the article, and the z axis measures the "social-like" nature of the article. I could have used any 3 of the 7 "core" keywords for the xyz axes, I do plan to explore these, and add that as an option to the form.

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