Science subreddits and their choice of words

Randall Munroe sorted the sciences nicely by purity. Let’s see what sequence the application of other metrics, like usage amount of specific words in the respective subreddits, yields.

About 434k randomly chosen comments to about 34k submissions from 2013-08 to 2014-07 on /r/biology, /r/chemistry, /r/compsci, /r/engineering, /r/geology, /r/math, /r/medicine, /r/physics, /r/psychology and /r/sociology were collected and analysed for frequency of specific words and phrases.

Yes, it’s more like a STEM collection, but since this is merely meant for entertaining, I guess this should not be a huge problem.

Chaos

Physicists talk most about chaos. Perhaps something quantum related, while the mathematicians maybe refer to their notes and not the theory? ;-)

chaos

Campus stuff

/r/sociology talks most about college related things, while /r/psychology does this quite seldom.

college

Use of profanity and words with negative connotations

Instead they use many swear words, while the math people are very civilized.

cursing

Evidence

Math, Physics and psychology lead this category.

evidence

Feeling

Psychology and sociology lead quite unsurprisingly in mentioning feelings.

feeling

Happiness

But astonishingly psychology is next to last when it comes to express positive feelings directly.

happiness

Intuition

Math seems to be the most intuitive science, or at least this word is used there the most.

intuition

Drugs

For sure psychologists use them solely for their research.

weed

other_drugs

And we now know why geologists are so happy. ;-)

beer

Mutual mentions

Here the trend is roughly clear. The more foundational a science is, the more often it is mentioned by others. Math > Physics > Chemistry > Biology > Psychology > Sociology. Especially Math stands out.

(Click here for the interactive version and an explanation for this diagram type.)

That’s it. If you want to you can download the raw data all these diagrams are based on.