Re-SearchTerms: A Shiny app for navigating open scholarship terms

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/qsp7x
• Publication Date: 2025-01-14T19:19:06Z
• Authors: Anna Yi Leung; Daniel Kristanto; Xenia Schmalz
• Keywords: Glossary; Similarity (geometry)

The wording of definitions for terms in open scholarship and research practices may be inconsistent, making it difficult researchers to understand apply them accurately. This hinders clear effective communication research. To address this, we developed “Re-SearchTerms”, a Shiny app that encourages revisit critically examine the meanings common related practice used diverse contexts. interactive platform enables exploration comparison from multiple sources, prompting users reflect on nuanced contexts key terms. Our dataset includes 2211 216 concepts scholarship, practices, statistical analysis, philosophy-of-science terminology. Definitions are sourced academic texts, crowdsourced FORRT glossary (Parsons et al., 2022), Wiktionary (Meyer, 2018). Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, Re-SearchTerms visualises term relationships based word co-occurrences sentence embeddings, allowing investigate co-occurrence patterns explore concept-level networks. Moreover, identify with high low semantic consistencies their definitions. Low similarity suggests variability how define potentially given term. finding underscores need pay closer attention use concepts, especially those consistency. is tool helps make deliberate informed choices when defining interpreting adaptive framework can applied other datasets enabling select terminology, interdisciplinary fields.