Topic Analysis of Scholarly Communication Research

Abstract

This study aims to identify specific topics, trends, and structural characteristics of scholarly communication research, based on 1,435 articles published from 1970 to 2018 in the Scopus database through Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, serial analysis, and network analysis. Topic modeling, time series analysis, and network analysis were used to analyze specific topics, trends, and structures, respectively. The results were summarized into three sets as follows. First, the specific topics of scholarly communication research were nineteen in number, including research resource management and research data, and their research proportion is even. Second, as a result of the time series analysis, there are three upward trending topics: Topic 6: Open Access Publishing, Topic 7: Green Open Access, Topic 19: Informal Communication, and two downward trending topics: Topic 11: Researcher Network and Topic 12: Electronic Journal. Third, the network analysis results indicated that high mean profile association topics were related to the institution, and topics with high triangle betweenness centrality, such as Topic 14: Research Resource Management, shared the citation context. Also, through cluster analysis using parallel nearest neighbor clustering, six clusters connected with different concepts were identified.