The Centre’s first project in corpus linguistics was the creation of a small corpus of nursing literature, consisting of the January 2005 issues of six representative nursing journals:

• The Journal of Clinical Nursing
• The Journal of Advanced Nursing
• The Journal of Emergency Nursing
• Nursing Outlook
• Nursing Research
• The Nurse Practitioner

This small pilot corpus consisted of 231,926 English words. To put this into perspective, many comparative studies use corpora of millions of words, and the largest corpora now available constitute hundreds of millions of words. The nursing corpus was analyzed using the software package TextUtils 1.01a2 (Summer Institute of Linguistics). Seven thousand unique words were identified, grouped under head words and ranked according to frequency of use. Words which occurred with a frequency of >1/10,000 are referred to as the TEbMP Nursing Word List 2005, and this list has been used in the creation of our own testing and teaching materials. The results of this project have been published in the Japan Journal of Nursing Science.

Work is now underway to produce a larger corpus of the nursing literature.