Abstract
This study aimed to characterize medical terms in an online cancer forum, with particular focus on specialization and semantic features. A three-step analysis was carried out on a 60-million-word corpus to detect and characterize the most typical medical terms used in a cancer forum by means of (1) keywords contrastive, (2) co-text-guided, and (3) semantic analyses. More than half of the 1000 words analysed were medical terms according to the co-text-guided analysis carried out. Most of them (73%) were dictionary-defined medical terms, followed by co-text-defined terms (9%) and medical initialisms (8.5%). The semantic analysis showed a higher number of terms within the fields of Anatomy, Treatment, Hospital and Symptoms. Our findings suggest that medical terms are commonly used in cancer forums, especially to share e-patients’ concerns about treatment, symptoms and hospital environment. The method followed is efficient and could be applied in future studies. Altogether, this article contributes to characterizing medical terms used by e-patients in online cancer forumsCopyright (c) 2020 Antonio Jesús Láinez Ramos, María Isabel Tercedor Sánchez
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.