The Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner and Davies, 2013) contains the top 3,000 words of academic English. You can download the list for free, and the AVL is now also integrated right into COCA itself. There are two different ways to see the words in the list:

1. By lemma (search)


 

2. By word families

In either case, each word in the list is linked to detailed "home pages", which show definitions and synonyms, frequency information, collocates and related topics, concordance lines, and more. You can also analyze your own texts and see keywords, get detailed information on words, and find related phrases in COCA.
Lemmas Families  
yes no Grouped by lemma (e.g. structure (v) = structure, structures, structured)
yes yes Distinguishes between parts of speech (e.g. structure as noun or verb)
no yes Group by "word family" (e.g. structure, structural, restructuring)
no yes Includes non-AVL words (e.g. common words, or just one academic domain)
yes no See frequency in nine main academic domains (e.g. Medicine or Law)
yes no Search entries (by word form, part of speech, frequency, and academic domain)