Visual Presentation of Research Topics with a Self-Organizing Map and Its Application to the Field of Information and Communication

This study used self-organizing map technique to identify andvisually present major research topic in the interdisciplinary field of “information and communication studies” in Taiwan. Terms wereextracted from bibliographic information of Master’s theses producedby six such programs in Taiwan. With sufficient rounds of training, aself-organizing map that represents the field as a whole was created. The map affords visualization of information regarding the major topics of the field, their relationships, and the magnitude of the output associated with each topic. The results demonstrate that the self-organizing map technique was able to efficiently generate visualization of the field comparable to other methods. Department specific maps were also generated to help represent the strength of each institute.