Information science techniques for investigating research areas: a case study in telecommunications policy

In an attempt to develop an understanding of existing research trends and to inform the development of new research in the field of telecommunications, literature reviews are being conducted. As an effort for investigating research trend, our research suggests the application of a text mining analysis technique to identify the knowledge structures of academic research in the field of telecommunications policy and to pinpoint future research opportunities. In this study, three analytical techniques were employed: a productivity analysis; a contents analysis based on topic modeling and word co-occurrence; and an author co-citation analysis based on a hierarchical clustering algorithm, multidimensional scaling, and a factor analysis. The findings from the research productivity analysis imply that the journal ‘Telecommunications Policy’ has greatly contributed to the publication of studies related to telecommunications policy. Moreover, our research institution analysis results indicate that telecommunication policy studies are undertaken by experts in various research fields. The contents and citation analysis results demonstrate that many studies related to telecommunications policy cover infrastructure-related topics, including the design, arrangement, and distribution of telecommunications networks. By contrast, recent studies are found to focus on the privacy and digital divide issues that may arise in connection with the application of telecommunications networks to other information technologies or industrial areas. However, the area of policy research that focuses on the application of information technologies still concentrates on the methods for the application of existing services—such as broadcasting and multimedia—without paying sufficient attention to the policy issues that may arise from the application of cloud computing, the Internet of Things, or big data analytics, services that have emerged with the recent expansion of wireless communications networks. In this sense, there is a need for discussions about the policies to respond to the increasing use of radio frequencies owing to the expansion of the Internet of Things, and to promote the efficient and safe control of data transmitted in real time on the wireless Internet. Studies of new technologies in the telecommunications policy field should be carried out in view of local and national characteristics. At the same time, further studies should consider efficient and reasonable ways to export telecommunications and networking technologies to countries that seek to invest in or expand their telecommunications networks to new information technologies. Expanding on this research, more text mining techniques for analyzing large amounts of text data and for clustering and visualizing them need to be considered.