Abstract
Aim of this procedural method is to construct well-founded corpora of scientific literature, and, hence, to track the evolution of knowledge fields from the reconstruction and clustering of words' life-cycles. The method contains: •an original selection process of relevant keywords involving the identification of relevant stems and stem n-grams through a matching with item lists of relevant glossaries;•several types of normalization of temporal trajectories of word raw frequencies•a properly customized clustering of word life-cycles, with a graphical extensive investigation of the best candidates for cluster number, to unveil the important dynamics and decipher the history of a scientific field.