Exploration of Topic Classification in the Tourism Field with Text Mining Technology—A Case Study of the Academic Journal Papers

This study collects abstracts of SSCI tourism journal papers between 2010 and 2019 from the WoS (Web of Science) database and uses a novel method of topic classification to explore the vocabulary characteristics of the classified articles. The corpora of abstracts are given quantitative Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) weights. A hierarchical K-means cluster analysis is then performed to automatically classify the articles; co-word analysis techniques are used to show the characteristics of feature words for distinct clusters, titles, and the consistency of the classified articles. Based on the results for 5783 abstracts, cluster analysis classifies the number of K-means clusters into six categories: travel, culture, sustainability, model, behavior, and hotel. A cross-check method is applied to assess the consistency of the topic classifications, list titles and keywords of the documents with the three smallest distances in each category and apply a strategic diagram to present the features of the distinct categories.