Abstract

Uncertainty means incomplete stages of knowledge of propositions due to the lack of consensus of information and existing knowledge. As the amount of academic literature increases exponentially over time, new knowledge is discovered as research develops. Although the flow of time may be an important factor to identify patterns of uncertainty in scientific knowledge, existing studies have only identified the nature of uncertainty based on the frequency in a particular discipline, and they did not take into consideration of the flow of time. Therefore, in this study, we identify and analyze the uncertainty words that indicate uncertainty in the scientific literature and investigate the stream of knowledge. We examine the pattern of biomedical knowledge such as representative entity pairs, predicate types, and entities over time. We also perform the significance testing using linear regression analysis. Seven pairs out of 17 entity pairs show the significant decrease pattern statistically and all 10 representative predicates decrease significantly over time. We analyze the relative importance of representative entities by year and identify entities that display a significant rising and falling pattern.