Evolution Of Research Topics Research Articles

What Communication Scholars Write About: An Analysis of 80 Years of Research in High-Impact Journals

Research topics, as indicators of the profession’s development, are central to the evaluation of academic practices in communication research. To investigate the main topics in our field, we trace the development of research topics since the 1930s by evaluating more than 15,000 articles from 19 academic journals based on an automated content analysis. Topic modeling reveals a high diversity from the early years on. Only a few journals show the tendency to focus on one topic only, whereas most outlets cover a broad variety and thus represent the field as a whole. Although our discipline is strongly interconnected with the changing media landscape, results show that communication research is characterized by high consistency. Although they have not provoked a revolutionary change, Internet and social media have become the most monitored media, parallel to—not displacing—classic media such as newspapers and TV.

Fifty Years of Consumer Issues inThe Journal of Consumer Affairs

This article is the Guest Editor's introduction to the virtual issue to celebrate the 50th anniversary ofJournal of Consumer Affairs(JCA) published on the journal website in the summer of 2016. The virtual issue highlights the research published duringJCA's first 50 years and includes 20 articles that reported on consumer issues which are still relevant today. The evolution of research topics over the 50 years shows that consumer issues have evolved from handling and resolving complaints to information search, decision making, consumer fraud, debt profiles, a hierarchy of saving needs, welfare reform, diffusion of innovations, identity theft, financial literacy, and health care reform. The 2010 creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can be seen as a capstone for the consumer movement. What will the next 50 years bring? We can assume thatJCAwill continue to be a leader in providing research on consumers and their issues.

Modeling and Analyzing of Research Topic Evolution Associated with Social Networks of Researchers

Research trends keep evolving along the time with certain trackable patterns. Mining academic literature and discovering the latent research trends evolution is an interesting and important problem. Few of previous studies focusing on academic topic evolution modeling have addressed the temporal topic evolution patterns. In addition, researchers' profile and their social networks are valuable complementary to the research trends tracking. In this study, to analyze the underlying research trends evolution along with the scientific collaborations of researchers, a novel temporal research trends evolution model associated with researchers' social networks is proposed and built. Specifically, the detected research topics are classified into different clusters in each timeslot, and the evolution patterns are deduced among these topic clusters. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated based on a real academic dataset. The experimental results can help users to discover the major research trends for specific fields. Besides, the tracked statuses of the corresponding scientific groups are helpful for searching research trends or finding collaboration opportunities according to researchers' different requirements.

Rediscovering 15 + 2 years of discoveries in language resources and evaluation

This paper analyzes the content of the proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) over the past 17 years (1998---2014), with the goal of gaining a picture of the LREC community and the topics that are most relevant to the field. We follow the methodology used in similar studies, including the survey of the IEEE ICASSP conference proceedings from 1976 to 1990, the survey of the Association of Computational Linguistics conference proceedings over 50 years, and the survey of the proceedings of the conferences contained in the ISCA Archive over 25 years (1987---2012). We expand on results originally presented at LREC 2014, but include the proceedings of LREC 2014 itself in the study together with an analysis of various citation graphs. We show the evolution over time of the number of papers and authors, including their distribution by gender and affiliation, as well as collaborations and citation patterns among authors and papers, funding sources for reported research, and plagiarism and reuse in LREC papers; results for LREC are compared with similar results for major conferences in related fields. We also consider the evolution of research topics over time and identify the authors who introduced key terms. Finally, we propose and apply a measure of a researcher's notability and provide the results for LREC authors. The study uses NLP methods that have been published in the corpus considered in the study. In addition to providing a revealing characterization of the LRE community, the study also demonstrates the need for establishing a system for unique identification of authors, papers and other sources to facilitate this type of analysis.

Analyzing evolution of research topics with NEViewer: a new method based on dynamic co-word networks

Understanding the evolution of research topics is crucial to detect emerging trends in science. This paper proposes a new approach and a framework to discover the evolution of topics based on dynamic co-word networks and communities within them. The NEViewer software was developed according to this approach and framework, as compared to the existing studies and science mapping software tools, our work is innovative in three aspects: (a) the design of a longitudinal framework based on the dynamics of co-word communities; (b) it proposes a community labelling algorithm and community evolution verification algorithms; (c) and visualizes the evolution of topics at the macro and micro level respectively using alluvial diagrams and coloring networks. A case study in computer science and a careful assessment was implemented and demonstrating that the new method and the software NEViewer is feasible and effective.

Becoming researchers: doctoral students' developmental processes

A key step in the development of skills to conduct independent research is the ability to develop topics of interest into research studies that examine problems of significance in a field of study. This qualitative interview study conducted in the USA examined how seven novice qualitative researchers who had taken course work in qualitative research methods selected topics for research and developed these into studies for dissertation research. Findings identify processes contributing to novice researchers' abilities to conceptualize their topics as significant. These processes include recognizing the need to integrate their interests in existing disciplinary fields, learning that occurred through the practice of fieldwork, applying guidance from advisors and committee members, and developing a deeper understanding of the relationship of their studies to existing research. The paper suggests points of tension for new scholars in the development of research topics, exploring how doctoral supervisors and instructors might assist students in learning how to design and conduct qualitative studies for doctoral research.

Evolution of research themes in Maritime Policy & Management—1973–2012

From its first issue in 1973, Maritime Policy & Management (MPM) has sought to be the main outlet for shipping and port research. During its 40-year development, it has indeed become the flagship journal in the field marked by its inclusion into the SSCI list in 2011. This paper examines how maritime research has developed over the last four decades by reviewing all the published papers in MPM. There has been a remarkable inflow of authors and institutions to MPM in recent decades especially from Asian countries. While ‘shipping’ research has been the most popular research area, a relative increase in ‘ports’ research has been observed in recent years. While economics has been a dominant disciplinary base, management-related disciplines contributed to the journal in the 2000s, increasing the disciplinary diversity of MPM. The study is useful not only for understanding the past and current state of maritime research, but also for developing a concrete foundation to discuss further development of MPM.

Low Hopes, High Expectations

This article revisits two classical issues in experimental methodology: experimenter bias and demand characteristics. We report a content analysis of the method section of experiments reported in two psychology journals (Psychological Science and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), focusing on aspects of the procedure associated with these two phenomena, such as mention of the presence of the experimenter, suspicion probing, and handling of deception. We note that such information is very often absent, which prevents observers from gauging the extent to which such factors influence the results. We consider the reasons that may explain this omission, including the automatization of psychology experiments, the evolution of research topics, and, most important, a view of research participants as passive receptacles of stimuli. Using a situated social cognition perspective, we emphasize the importance of integrating the social context of experiments in the explanation of psychological phenomena. We illustrate this argument via a controversy on stereotype-based behavioral priming effects.

The evolution of robotics research

This article surveys traditional research topics in industrial robotics and mobile robotics and then expands on new trends in robotics research that focus more on the interaction between human and robot. The new trends in robotics research have been denominated service robotics because of their general goal of getting robots closer to human social needs, and this article surveys research on service robotics such as medical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, underwater robotics, field robotics, construction robotics and humanoid robotics. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the evolution of research topics in robotics from classical motion control for industrial robots to modern intelligent control techniques and social learning paradigms, among other aspects.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Web Engineering--The Evolution of New Technologies

The Web is now the most popular environment for circulating information as network-accessible data; the exponential growth in this information’s dissemination is contributing to the evolution of research topics in the field of Web engineering. This issue of CiSE magazine focuses on understanding and emphasizing engineering topics as they’re applied in today’s Web environment and infrastructure.