Automatic Term Identification for Bibliometric Mapping

A term map is a map that visualizes the structure of a scientific field by showing the relations between important terms in the field. The terms shown in a term map are usually selected manually with the help of domain experts. Manual term selection has the disadvantages of being subjective and labor-intensive. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a methodology for automatic term identification and we use this methodology to select the terms to be included in a term map. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we use it to construct a term map of the field of operations research. The quality of the map is assessed by a number of operations research experts. It turns out that in general the proposed methodology performs quite well.