Constructing Scholarly Knowledge Graphs From Sociology Research Papers: Incremental Changes in Cause-Effect Statements

Researchers have been working on different aspects of representing scientific research papers as machine-processable knowledge graphs. This study extends that work to the domain of social science research papers—specifically aiming to construct scholarly knowledge graphs that represent research results together with their supporting arguments, showing how research claims are incrementally constructed following the discourse structure of the paper. The study analyzed 30 sociology research papers that aimed to find or confirm cause-effect relationships between concepts. It analyzed the causal structure of the research result statements in the papers and investigated what additional information is provided by other statements in the papers performing the argument/rhetorical functions of general statement, topic centrality, literature review, research gap, research objective, research method, research result, and research contribution. A cause-effect information frame that lists all possible roles in a causal information structure was used to guide the analysis. We show that a scholarly knowledge graph representing the research results in a social science research paper must include information extracted from multiple statements in the paper, to provide a comprehensive view of the constructed knowledge. Together, these statements, taken in sequence, form the argument flow of the paper, showing how knowledge is constructed. The study also implemented a prototype graph visualization application to help users examine the causal structure of the research result statements and how that structure is incrementally constructed when the information content of the other statements is viewed in sequence. This tool enables readers to explore conflicting or unexpected results, trace how cause-effect relationships are generalized or specialized, and understand the overall causal information structure accumulated across the paper.