Abstract
Purpose: Electronic publication of present and archival journal materials has aided medical physics research by decreasing the effort necessary to locate relevant articles. Additionally, ease of access via electronic publishing has improved the prospect for meta‐studies. The purpose of this meta‐study is to investigate the past, present, and emerging trends in medical physics research. Methods: Keyword analysis was performed on abstracts from the journal Medical Physics from January 1994 — February 2013. Keywords were chosen by article authors. Similar keywords were reconciled via manual and clustering techniques. Frequency and trend analysis was performed. Keywords were weighted by article and total keyword occurrence over time. Results: Major and minor keyword trends were apparent along with the overall increase in number of articles published per month and change in keywords per article. Conclusion: While keyword data may not be sufficient to enable strong statistical prediction of emerging research trends, visualization of keyword trends allows for a better qualitative understanding of these trends. Full access to the journal article corpus would enable stronger predictive analytic techniques to be successfully performed.
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