Revealing role of the Korean Physics Society with keyword co-occurrence network

Abstract

Science and society inevitably interact with each other and evolve together. Studying the trend of science helps recognize leading topics significant for research and establish better policies to allocate funds efficiently. Scholarly societies such as the Korean Physics Society (KPS) also play an important role in the history of science. Figuring out the role of these scholarly societies motivate our research related with our society since societies pay attention to improve our society. Although several studies try to capture the trend of science leveraging scientific documents such as paper or patents, these studies limited their research scope only to the academic world, neglecting the interaction with society. Here we tried to understand the trend of science along with society using a public magazine named Physics and High Technology, published by the KPS. We built keyword co-occurrence networks for each time period and applied community detection to capture the keyword structure and tracked the structure’s evolution. In the networks, a research-related cluster is consistently dominant over time, and sub-clusters of the research-related cluster divide into various fields of physics, implying specialization of the physics discipline. Also, we found that education and policy clusters appear consistently, revealing the KPS’s contribution to science and society. Furthermore, we applied PageRank algorithm to selected keywords (“semiconductor”, “woman”, “evading”, etc.) to investigate the temporal change of the importance of keywords in the network. For example, the importance of the keyword “woman” increases as time goes by, indicating that academia also pays attention to gender issues reflecting the social movement in recent years.