Quick Hit: ASEEES Paper Topics

I'm hoping to have something a little more in depth about Soviet dissertations and/or quantifying the topics of plagiarized papers in Russia. In the meantime, I have a bit of data from the conferences of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES, the former AAASS), the main scholarly association for Russian and Eurasian studies.

What I did for this was parse the records of the national ASEEES/AAASS conventions from 2004 to 2012 and count the words that appear, not counting very common words (stopwords). I don't think the results will shock anyone but they are interesting to see. Russian, Soviet and Russia are by far the three most common words, which reflects the dominance of Russian studies in ASEEES. However, I was a little surprised that Poland and Polish were the 14th and 21st most common. Last observation and then I will post the hundred most common words in the data: Stalin > Dostoevsky > Tolstoy > Pushkin > Putin.

	Word	Total	Frequency
1	RUSSIAN	881	1.58%
2	SOVIET	761	1.37%
3	RUSSIA	639	1.15%
4	WAR	444	0.80%
5	POLITICS	240	0.43%
6	POLITICAL	228	0.41%
7	NEW	228	0.41%
8	IDENTITY	204	0.37%
9	WORLD	203	0.36%
10	STATE	195	0.35%
11	WOMEN	181	0.33%
12	CULTURE	179	0.32%
13	NATIONAL	172	0.31%
14	POLAND	161	0.29%
15	LIFE	159	0.29%
16	HISTORY	158	0.28%
17	LATE	158	0.28%
18	IMPERIAL	155	0.28%
19	EARLY	147	0.26%
20	JEWISH	146	0.26%
21	POLISH	144	0.26%
22	CASE	143	0.26%
23	EUROPE	142	0.25%
24	CENTURY	141	0.25%
25	SOCIAL	140	0.25%
26	UNION	133	0.24%
27	LITERATURE	132	0.24%
28	SOCIALIST	131	0.24%
29	UKRAINE	128	0.23%
30	REVOLUTION	125	0.22%
31	LANGUAGE	122	0.22%
32	EUROPEAN	122	0.22%
33	CENTRAL	121	0.22%
34	EAST	121	0.22%
35	POST-SOVIET	120	0.22%
36	POLICY	119	0.21%
37	MEMORY	118	0.21%
38	UKRAINIAN	117	0.21%
39	CONTEMPORARY	113	0.20%
40	CULTURAL	111	0.20%
41	ART	107	0.19%
42	POETRY	102	0.18%
43	GENDER	101	0.18%
44	EMPIRE	100	0.18%
45	PUBLIC	100	0.18%
46	MOSCOW	99	0.18%
47	ECONOMIC	97	0.17%
48	SOCIETY	97	0.17%
49	COMMUNIST	95	0.17%
50	CINEMA	95	0.17%
51	SPACE	94	0.17%
52	POWER	93	0.17%
53	HUNGARY	91	0.16%
54	VIOLENCE	90	0.16%
55	CZECH	89	0.16%
56	LITERARY	88	0.16%
57	WRITING	86	0.15%
58	ROLE	86	0.15%
59	CHILDREN	85	0.15%
60	RELATIONS	84	0.15%
61	FILM	84	0.15%
62	AMERICAN	80	0.14%
63	GREAT	79	0.14%
64	STALIN	79	0.14%
65	INTERNATIONAL	79	0.14%
66	DOSTOEVSKY	78	0.14%
67	EASTERN	78	0.14%
68	ERA	75	0.13%
69	RELIGIOUS	74	0.13%
70	TOLSTOY	74	0.13%
71	FOREIGN	74	0.13%
72	PUSHKIN	71	0.13%
73	LOCAL	71	0.13%
74	READING	70	0.13%
75	GERMAN	70	0.13%
76	NATION	69	0.12%
77	COLD	68	0.12%
78	WESTERN	68	0.12%
79	YUGOSLAVIA	68	0.12%
80	HUNGARIAN	66	0.12%
81	CIVIL	66	0.12%
82	1930S	66	0.12%
83	CITY	66	0.12%
84	FAMILY	66	0.12%
85	MAKING	65	0.12%
86	PUTIN	64	0.11%
87	REVOLUTIONARY	64	0.11%
88	II	64	0.11%
89	CHURCH	63	0.11%
90	MODERN	63	0.11%
91	ASIA	62	0.11%
92	MUSIC	62	0.11%
93	SLAVIC	62	0.11%
94	PERSPECTIVE	62	0.11%
95	STALINIST	62	0.11%
96	PARTY	62	0.11%
97	HISTORICAL	61	0.11%
98	DEVELOPMENT	61	0.11%
99	NATIONALISM	61	0.11%
100	CONSTRUCTION	60	0.11%