Research Trends on Critical Thinking Using Topic Modeling

Abstract

In the current study, academic journal papers on critical thinking were comprehensively analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective, which would contribute to solidify the significance of critical thinking. To achieve the research purpose, keyword analysis and the topic modeling technique were applied as part of text-mining. After being issued with the open API code of KCI (Korean Journal of Citation Index), the researcher collected the papers from the KCI. In the process of data collection (which consisted of keyword preprocessing and in which the subsequent topic model analysis took place), potential research topics were presented from the corpus consisting of the title and keywords by the researcher, and the abstracts of inidividual theses from a total of 718 papers from 2002 to 2021 were examined. The results of this study are summarized as follows: First, keywords such as ‘undergraduate students’, ‘writing’, and ‘simulation’ were included in the frequent keywords both in the Term-Frequency (TF) and in the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) value in the keyword analysis. Second, 12 potential research topics regarding critical thinking were derived from topic modeling. The topics covered were (1) education by field, (2) learning, (3) online, (4) school-age students, (5) media and communication, (6) nursing education, (7) coursework development, (8) writing, (9) educational program and leadership, (10) philosophical counseling and textual criticism, (11) the confidence, sensitivity, and ethics awareness of undergraduate nursing students, (12) and empirical analysis for encumbent nurses. The research comprehensively looked at the various perspectives on critical thinking. From the results of the analysis, various aspects of the relationship between critical thinking and education, the link between creativity and critical thinking, and the meaning of the ‘disposition’ of critical thinking research, and its tendency towards empirical analysis in the field of nursing, were discussed. In addition, critical thinking in the workplace is suggested as a topic for future critical thinking research.