A technical approach for suggesting research directions in telecommunications policy

The bibliometric analysis is widely used for understanding research domains, trends, and knowledge structures in a particular field. The analysis has majorly been used in the field of information science, and it is currently applied to other academic fields. This paper describes the analysis of academic literatures for classifying research domains and for suggesting empty research areas in the telecommunications policy. The application software is developed for retrieving Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge (WoK) data via web services. It also used for conducting text mining analysis from contents and citations of publications. We used three text mining techniques: the Keyword Extraction Algorithm (KEA) analysis, the co-occurrence analysis, and the citation analysis. Also, R software is used for visualizing the term frequencies and the co-occurrence network among publications. We found that policies related to social communication services, the distribution of telecommunications infrastructures, and more practical and data-driven analysis researches are conducted in a recent decade. The citation analysis results presented that the publications are generally received citations, but most of them did not receive high citations in the telecommunications policy. However, although recent publications did not receive high citations, the productivity of papers in terms of citations was increased in recent ten years compared to the researches before 2004. Also, the distribution methods of infrastructures, and the inequity and gap appeared as topics in important references. We proposed the necessity of new research domains since the analysis results implies that the decrease of political approaches for technical problems is an issue in past researches. Also, insufficient researches on policies for new technologies exist in the field of telecommunications. This research is significant in regard to the first bibliometric analysis with abstracts and citation data in telecommunications as well as the development of software which has functions of web services and text mining techniques. Further research will be conducted with Big Data techniques and more text mining techniques.