An overview of Telecommunications Policy's 40-year research history: Text and bibliographic analyses

Abstract

The journal, Telecommunications Policy (TP), marked its 40-year milestone in 2016. At this juncture of a 40-year milestone, this paper implements a text analysis with keyword frequency data derived from the abstracts of papers published over the past 40 years to take a look at the big picture of key concepts that constitute the journal's research subjects. With keywords and bibliographic data, this paper calculates key research indexes to overview the dynamic changes in research focuses in the journal. This paper found that the differences in research performance across research subjects within three continents has declined over time, even though wide differences in research performance across subjects within nations still exist, and that the mid-1990s marked a watershed dividing the 40-year history into two parts.