Exploring the Research Topics and Their Relations in the Field of Information Communication via Term Co-Occurrence Network Analyses

This paper reports on a new method for exploring the prominentresearch topics and the relations between them in the field ofinformation communication studies. Analyzing the term co-occurrencenetwork composed of topical terms extracted from the masters’ theses of the related graduate schools in Taiwan, this study was ableto identify prominent clusters of topical terms, which representedimportant research topics in the field. Visual representations of thetopical relationships were also provided. The study findings reveal that,although the network was of low density, its characteristic path lengthand the average clustering coefficient indicated that it had the featuresof a small-world network. This suggests that the research topics in thisfield were highly diverse and dispersed, while some overlaps existedamong the prominent topical areas. In addition, the identified topics andrelationships also revealed the field’s roots in communication studies,library and information science, and information and communicationtechnologies.