Scientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other sociocultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

中文翻译：

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科学著作中语言的进化模式：皇家学会哲学汇刊（1665-1869）的案例研究

科学著作作为人类文化的一个重要组成部分，几个世纪以来已经演变成现在的形式。了解科学著作是如何演变的，对于理解科学文化的发展趋势特别有帮助。它还使我们能够更好地了解科学文化是如何与人类文化普遍交织在一起的。当今大量数字化文本的可用性和计算技术的进步为我们提供了一种方便且可靠的方式，通过检查历时语言变化来辨别科学著作中的进化模式。科学著作的语言变化反映了随着科学和科学著作的历史变化而发生的体裁变化。这项研究调查了科学著作中的一般进化语言模式。它通过合并两种可靠的计算方法来实现：相对熵；词嵌入的具体性和形象性。因此，它创建了一种新颖的定量方法，并将其应用于检查《皇家学会哲学汇刊》（PTRS，1665-1869）中的历时变化。来自两种计算方法的数据可以很好地映射，以支持该期刊遵循日益专业化和专业化的演变趋势的论点。但这也表明，该期刊的语言使用受到历史事件和其他社会文化因素的极大影响。这项研究，作为一种“文化学”方法，表明科学话语中的语言进化模式已被外部因素打断，即使这种科学话语很可能已经累积发展成为一种专业和专业的体裁。本研究提出的方法可以为科学计量学的全文分析做出巨大贡献。