Analyzing Structural & Temporal Characteristics of Keyword System in Academic Research Articles

Keyword networks, formed from keywords occurring in scholarly articles provide a useful mechanism for understanding academic research trends. In keyword networks, keywords are represented as nodes and a link is formed between a pair of keywords if they appear in the same article. Each link is assigned a weight, representing the number of co-occurrences of the pair in different articles. A statistical and visual analysis of the structural and temporal characteristics of such networks reveals the organizing pattern and the evolution of keywords. In this study we analyse the difference between structured keyword system and unstructured keyword system. We use keywords from two prominent business management journals from USA and India and analyse the corresponding keyword networks. Our results indicate that the network characteristics of structured keyword system are more suitable than unstructured keyword system to analyse research trends and bring forth the emerging areas and popular research methods. The adoption of structured keyword system will aid researchers and funding agencies to optimize their decision on the use of research funding.