The evolution of the telecommunications policy agenda: Forty years of articles in Telecommunications Policy

This paper investigates the evolution of the telecommunications policy agenda by means of text mining forty years -from 1976 to 2016- of papers in the journal Telecommunications Policy. Text mining techniques help identify the key topics, the dominant combinations of concepts and the main areas of research within this multidisciplinary -technical, economic, social, policy- discipline. In addition they depict an evolution of the policy agenda more nuanced than the conventional public service, pre-competition and post-liberalisation stages typical of telecommunications. Also, in combination with bibliometric information, the results display the relationships between areas of research and methodologies, countries and authors' background, all together providing a deeper understanding of the past, present and future avenues for research in telecommunications policy.