Evolution of IT, management and industrial engineering research: A topic model approach

Information Technology (IT), management and industrial engineering are correlated academic disciplines whose publications have risen signicantly over the last decades. The aim of this study is to analyze the research evolution, determine the important topics and areas, and depict the trend of interdisciplinary topics in these domains. To accomplish this, text mining techniques are used and a combination of bibliographic analysis and a topic modeling approach are applied to relevant publications in the Web of Science (WoS) repository over the last 20 years. In the topic extraction process, a heuristic function was suggested for key extraction, and some new applicable criteria were dened to compare the topics. Moreover, a novel approach was proposed to determine the high-level category for each topic. The results determined the hot-important topics, and incremented, decremented and xed topics are identied. Subsequently, a comparison between high-level research areas conrmed strong scientic relationships between them. This study presents a deep knowledge about the internal research evolution of domains and illustrates the eect of topics on each other over the past 20 years. Furthermore, the methodology of this study could be applied to determine interdisciplinary topics and observe the research evolution of other academic domains.