Lexicons in conceptual change research: Exploration of twelve research papers

Conceptual change (cc) research tradition is not a single theory, but includes different branches and theoretical models. In these models, somewhat unsystematic use of terminology exists. This study investigates the terminology, lexicons and their overlapping in twelve central scientific articles within cc-research field utilizing a network analysis tool. The articles were selected based on certain criteria representing seminal articles, different cc-branches and reviews and they were published between 1982 and 2018. The study contributes
to the discussion about the need of unifying the used terminology, when similar constructs are handled with different terms among the cc-tradition. The study provides a new methodological tool to explore and visualize the occurrence of concepts and inter-relatedness of them among cc-literature. The semantic network analysis reveals similarity in terminology of texts that belong to supposedly same kind of cc-research traditions, and on the other hand, clearly lower similarity between texts in different traditions. The results also show that there has attempts to unify the key-terminology in review articles, but these initiatives have not affected the terminology used texts that belong opposing disciplinary groups. Identifying the overlapping in different models would enable the meaningful unifying of terminology, which again is suggested to be desirable for the future theoretical progress of cc-research.