Abstract
Contrary to usual expectations, international students, who have to read papers in social sciences, can rapidly understand and learn highly specialized terms in each field of their study, because they already know the notions expressed in the terms. Not surprisingly, they have greater difficulty in learning words, that are commonly used in all areas of social sciences, or in other academic fields. The present study seeks to identify, using a large corpus of data, three groups of words in the fundamental literature of the social sciences: field specific terms, terms in common in all the fields of social science, and the frequent words in all academic papers. In this analysis, a great importance is placed on the practical utility for the acquisition of vocabulary in these fields.
