Defining the Discipline of Aerosol Science and its Relation to Other Scientific Disciplines: Text Analytics of Topics Making up the American Association for Aerosol Research

SARAH PETTERS, Donald Dabdub, David R. Cocker III, Andrew Grieshop, Christine McCool, Nga Lee Ng, Amy P. Sullivan, Aarhus University

     Abstract Number: 617
     Working Group: History of Aerosol Science

Abstract
The American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) annual meeting is the major forum in the United States for presenting new insight in aerosol research, addressing a broad range of societal needs using the tools and perspectives of the natural sciences, engineering, and public health. The meeting program is divided into approximately 15 topics (aerosol chemistry, aerosol exposure, aerosol physics, …, and urban aerosols). These topicals have been relatively stable in the first 40 years since the institution of AAAR. However, they overlap in scope, and their boundaries are not clearly defined. This has resulted in imbalance between the disciplines represented, and many abstracts are submitted to sessions with which they are not aligned. Here we present the results of a Task Force formed by the AAAR Board of Directors to examine this imbalance and propose a set of topics and keywords to help guide the submission of abstracts. Two decades of conference abstracts were cleaned and aggregated by topic. Topics contained 3000 to 9000 abstracts each and were decomposed by word frequency. Word spectra and lexical distance between topics were used as the basis for keywords and aim-and-scope statements. The case is made for topics with significant overlap to be reexamined with the goal of increasing the resiliency of the association and balancing its working groups. Results clarify the scope and flexibility of the groups making up AAAR, helping to define the discipline of aerosol science and illuminating it as an integral part of other scientific disciplines in the natural sciences, engineering, and public health.