4. Conclusions

This study presents a bibliometric, network-theoretic and text-based analysis of the design research area during the last 12-year period. Our work is the first in-depth study on keeping track of the current advances in the design research area by using text mining techniques. Furthermore, the result shows that the developed methods are universal and could be applied to manage the knowledge of various research fields. Additionally, text mining techniques used in this study could help researchers have a comprehensive understanding about the knowledge of a certain field hidden in a large amount of scientific literature. The clustering method provides an architecture overview of a certain field in more detail. Additionally, social network analysis further explores the core themes to help researchers with a better understanding of the development gain of a certain field.

For further studies, we will apply the author-topic model, a probabilistic model to link authors to observed words in the scientific literature of the research fields (a case study of design research), which will provide a general framework for exploration, discovery and query-answering in the context of the relationships of author and topics.