Stop and Go Lists

Words in stop lists are words which are filtered out when processing text. Stop words are short function words that occur very often and which do not convey any particular meaning. Examples are 'the', 'a', 'you', 'is', 'at', 'on' and 'which'. ATLAS.ti offers predefined stop lists in 35 languages. These stop lists are based on the information provided by Ranks NL.

In contrast, if you set a word list as Go List, then only the words that are in the list are counted.

Selecting a Stop List

To select a stop list, click on the drop-down button for Exclude

Selecting a stop list

Importing a Stop List

If you have been importing an older version 8 project, the selection list might be empty:

Empty selection list

All available stop lists are however already on your computer. They were copied during the installation on ATLAS.ti. To retrieve them:

Click on the Edit button and select Import Lists.

Import existing stop or go lists

This brings you do the directory where all stop lists that come with ATLAS.ti are stored:

C:\Users...\Documents\Scientific Software\ATLASti.22\Stopwords

Stop Lists that are delivered with ATLAS.ti

Select all lists that you want to use and click Open.

Close the window, return to the word cloud and select a stop list.

Below you see an example for a word cloud where a stop list was applied:

Word Cloud with applied stop list

Cleaning up a Word Cloud

In the word cloud above, there are still a lot of words that distract from the content of the interviews like all speaker IDs: INT, SHAZ, DEB, AL, STU.

You can either remove the words from the current cloud, or add the words the stop list. Then they are also not counted in other word clouds that you create later.

To remove a word from a word cloud temporarily, select the word, right-click and select Remove.

If you want to remove it from all word clouds permanently:

Right-click on a word and select Add to stop list.

Remove a word from a word cloud

The cleaned up word cloud might look as follows:

Cleaned up Word Cloud

Creating a New Stop or Go Lists

In the ribbon in the section Stop/Go Lists, click on the Edit button.

Edit stop or go list

In the next window, select New List from the ribbon.

Create new stop or go list

Enter a name for the list and select as list type: Stop List or Go List. Enter an optional comment to describe the purpose of the list.

Click Create.

Enter a name for the new stop or go list

To add words to the newly created list, click on th New Word button a few times. Every time you click, a new field is added where you can enter a word.

RegEx: You can enter regular expressions, if you want to enter specific terms to the list. If so, you need to tick the Regex box. Optionally you can write a comment that explains the regular expression.

Add words to a stop or go list

You can turn a stop list into a go list (or vice versa) by changing the List Type. Other options in the ribbon are to duplicate and to delete word lists.

Change list type

Exporting a Stop or Go List

Exporting a stop or go list allows you to:

  • share it with other users
  • use it in another project

In the ribbon, click on Export List. A file manager opens. Select a location and enter a name and click on Save.

The list is saved as Excel file.

Creating a User-Defined Stop or Go List in Excel

Importing a user defined list works as follows:

Export an existing list and open it in Excel. It serves as a template.

In Excel, change the name of the list, but leave all the header information as is. If you want to prepare a go list, enter 'no' in the second column/second row under Stop List.

Now delete all words and replace them with new words, one word per row.

Prepare a list in Excel

Save the list under a new name and import it.