Friday 16 April 2010

How much research is indexed by Google Scholar with Love, Depression, Schizophrenia, Money and Silicon in.

A quick Google Scholar search shows 136,000 papers indexed with "Love"
in the title compared to the 242,000 papers with "depression" in,
126,000 with "schizophrenia", 83,200 with "bipolar", 110,000 with
"money" and 400,000 with "silicon".

Settings were to only search in the title (so author names wouldn't be
counted) through research from any time period. It excluded any patents
and searched in all categories in the Google Scholar database. This
could be extended to include other indexes and the counts averaged to
make the quality more robust but I think its more interesting to try
other words like "religion" (167,000), "politics" (308,000, "humour OR
humor" (36,100), "cheese" (47,100), "porn" (1,060 and rising to 6,120
with pornography and pornographic included).

This, I'm afraid, proves very little but there's probably a lot of
inferences that could be made from it. There's an interesting question
that it tries to answer. How much research has there been in indexed
academic literature on the spectrum of the human condition and how does
that compare with other areas of research.

Going through other elements like "carbon" (566,000), "iron" (385,000),
"hydrogen" 380,000 and "oxygen" (351,000) shows the levels of research
(indexed by Google) that have gone into the understanding of the
physical world. The mental world of our inner mind and the human
condition has been little studied in scientific literature in comparison
and most of the research is in mental health.

The comparison for all British Journal of Psychiatry papers every
published are "love" (39), "depression" (1178), "schizophrenia" (1784),
"bipolar" (206 - though this excludes papers on manic depression), money
(15) and silicon (1).

These searches could also be refined to use lots of key words, so the
example with bipolar would be to include "mania", "manic", "manic
depression" and "manic depressive."

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We It comes in part from an appreciation that no one can truly sign their own work. Everything is many influences coming together to the one moment where a work exists. The other is a begrudging acceptance that my work was never my own. There is another consciousness or non-corporeal entity that helps and harms me in everything I do. I am not I because of this force or entity. I am "we"