An Analysis of the Research Trends for Urban Study using Topic Modeling

Research trends can be usefully used to determine the importance of research topics by period, identify insufficient research fields, and discover new fields. In this study, research trends of urban spaces, where various problems are occurring due to population concentration and urbanization, were analyzed by topic modeling. The analysis target was the abstracts of papers listed in the Korea Citation Index (KCI) published between 2002 and 2019. Topic modeling is an algorithm-based text mining technique that can discover a certain pattern in the entire content, and it is easy to cluster. In this study, the frequency of keywords, trends by year, topic derivation, cluster by topic, and trend by topic type were analyzed. Research in urban regeneration is increasing continuously, and it was analyzed as a field where detailed topics could be expanded in the future. Furthermore, urban regeneration is now becoming a regular research field. On the other hand, topics related to development/growth and energy/environment have entered a stagnation period. This study is meaningful because the correlation and trends between keywords were analyzed using topic modeling targeting all domestic urban studies.