Text Analysis of Communication Faculty Publications to Identify Research Trends and Interest

Abstract

Text analysis has been widely used to identify research trends in many disciplines. However, little has been written about using this method to discover a department’s research trends and faculty research interests in the library setting. This study examined 107 faculty publications from the School of Communication at the University of Houston. It analyzed word and phrase frequencies from titles and abstracts using Voyant tools. The analysis was performed on both the department level and the individual faculty level. This article demonstrates a new way for librarians to understand faculty research. The method can be replicated by subject librarians to analyze their own departments.

KEYWORDS:

• Text analysis
• text mining
• research trends
• research interest
• communication faculty