Intellectual Structure of Knowledge Organization Research: Temporal Change and Scholarly Variation Across Communities and Geographic Regions

This study examines key topics and trends in knowledge organization (KO) research. Using text mining, a corpus of 1444 research articles published between 2008 and 2023 in three leading KO journals was analyzed. The BERTopic model, a neural topic modeling approach based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) text representations, was used to generate initial topics, which were then manually reviewed and consolidated into 16 final topics for comparative statistical analyses. The findings identify “cataloging” and “subject headings/ontology/thesaurus” as the dominant topics. Publications on “subject headings/ontology/thesaurus”, “KO and diversity/Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer or Questioning, and other identities (LGBTQ+)”, and “linked data/Bibliographic Framework (BIBFRAME)” increased over time, whereas those on “cataloging”, “KO education”, and “library preservation” declined over the study period. A comparison between academics and practitioners revealed distinct topical emphases, with academics focusing more on conceptual and theoretical aspects of KO and practitioners placing greater emphasis on practical aspects. Cross-continent comparisons likewise revealed distinct regional research priorities, with several topics showing significant overrepresentation within specific continents. The findings highlight both continuity and change in KO research priorities and reveal meaningful differences in topical focus across groups and regions. By identifying dominant topics, temporal shifts, and cross-group differences, this study provides a systematic view of the KO research field and offers insights to guide future research directions and scholarly collaborations.