Topic Trends in Knowledge and Information Science in Domestic Prestigious Iranian Journals Based on the LDA Model

The content analysis of the scientific papers can indicate the path of development and thematic orientations in any field. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the subjecttrends of the field of knowledge and information science in Iranian journals based on the LDA model.
The current research is descriptive and exploratory; since text-mining techniques were used to identify hidden topics and topic trends in the field of knowledge and information science based on the LDA algorithm. The statistical population of the current research includes abstracts and keywords of papers published in 11 scientific journals approved by the Iran Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology in the field of knowledge and information science during 2015-2019, which includes 1581 papers. The validity of the LDA method has been confirmed in previous studies and the reliability of the extracted data was confirmed by the inter-rater reliability method.
The findings showed that, in general, the subjects of citation analysis, library, and web were the interest subjects of researchers in the field of knowledge and information science, respectively, in the first to third place. During 2015 - 2019, the subjects of "Organizational Culture", "Social Networks", "Information Literacy", "Knowledge Management" and "Instagram" were the main subjects of the field of knowledge and information science. Another finding of the research showed that in different journals, different and sometimes common topics have been of interest to researchers in the field of knowledge and information science. Knowledge management and similar and related topics such as knowledge sharing are more important in the two journals of "The Journal of Studies in Library and Information Science" and "The Iranian Journal of Information Processing & Management". Also in most journals "Librarians" and "Users" have been among the main subjects studied.
Data mining techniques can be a suitable tool to facilitate and speed up the formulation of thematic processes in a field. In order to keep up with the journals of the field worldwide, it is necessary that the topics related to technology be considered in more journals. Also, journal editors should try to publish papers based on the policy and thematic areas overtime.