Using LLMs for Automatic Discipline Annotation in a Diachronic Corpus of English Scientific Papers

This study investigates the potential of generative large language models (LLMs) to automatically identify the disciplines of scientific papers in the Royal Society Corpus (RSC) – an extensive collection of English scientific publications spanning more than three centuries. We evaluated eight open-source, state-of-the-art LLMs from four model families on a manually annotated subset and further validated the three best-performing models on a corpus of modern scientific texts. These models were subsequently used for large-scale annotation of the RSC. The models exhibited robust and consistent performance, with at least two LLMs agreeing on the same label for 98.3% of the documents. We then conducted an error analysis of papers assigned divergent labels and a diachronic case study of disciplinary trends within the corpus. The error analysis revealed that most discrepancies occurred in twentieth-century texts, reflecting the growing interdisciplinarity of research. The diachronic analysis showed a gradual decline in disciplinary diversity over time as well as fluctuations corresponding to major paradigm shifts such as the Chemical Revolution and key twentieth-century developments in Physics. The discipline labels generated by the three models will be made publicly available.