Co-Occurrence-Based Double Thresholding Method for Research Topic Identification

Abstract

Identifying possible research gaps is a main step in problem framing, however it is increasingly tedious and expensive considering the continuously growing amount of published material. This situation suggests the critical need for methodologies and tools that can assist researchers in their selection of future research topics. Related work mostly focuses on trend analysis and impact prediction but less on research gap identification. This paper presents our first approach in automated identification of feasible research gaps by using a double-threshold procedure to eliminate the research gaps that are currently difficult to study or offer little novelty. Gaps are then found by extracting subgraphs for the less-frequent co-occurrences and correlations of key terms describing domains. A case study applying the methodology for electronic design automation (EDA) domain is also discussed in the paper.

Keywords

• research gap
• natural language processing
• co-occurrence matrix
• double-thresholding method