A Tool for Addressing Construct Identity in Literature Reviews and Meta-Analyses

The underlying idea of latent semantic analysis (LSA) (Deerwester et al. 1990) is that the aggregate of all of the contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of constraints that determines the similarity of meanings for words, and sets of words, to each other (Landauer et al. 1998). Thus, when two terms occur in contexts of similar meaning, even if they never occur in the same passage, LSA represents them as having similar meanings.