Qualitative evaluation of content similarity in the context of clinical research

Abstract

‘Burnout’ is one of those medical terms that lack a consensual definition, although its definitions may appear very similar. This paper outlines and discusses research carried out to find the shared elements of the original reference definitions of ‘burnout’ used in scientific literature between the 1990s and today, as a preliminary step towards the setting up of a harmonised definition. In order to pinpoint what is common in the original reference definitions of ‘burnout’, we developed and implemented a methodology based on the application of a linguistic – in particular, semantic – analysis. Our methodology may be of interest to researchers in other fields as a way to carry out a preliminary investigation of the definitions in use for a (specialist) term.