Application of Text Mining Techniques in Analyzing the Topic Flow of Papers Published in Iranian Accounting Journals

The advancement of postgraduate education and the substantial rise in the publication of papers in all fields of knowledge, particularly in the field of accounting, require closer attention to the current publication situation of scholarly papers. Studying the research trend through the topic analysis of papers published in domestic scholarly journals, which is an example of the scientific map of a field, is of outstanding importance for organizations, researchers, and science policymakers. Therefore, the present study is aimed at analyzing the papers published in the journals approved by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology in the field of accounting from the first issue published after receiving scientific rank until the end of 2020 employing text mining techniques.

Out of 4924 papers published in 20 accounting journals over three decades, 4201 papers whose English abstracts were available on the websites of journals and databases were selected as the sample and used for subject classification.To identify the most important words used in the papers, TF-IDF weighting algorithm was used, and the LDA topic modeling technique was implemented to extract topics. Moreover, the Python programming language was employed to apply text mining algorithms.

The research findings indicate that capital market (29%), financial accounting (20%), corporate governance (10%), financial reporting and corporate social responsibility (9%), management accounting (9%), auditing (8%), finance and investment (7%), public sector accounting (3%), accounting education and research (3%), banking and information systems (2%) are respectively the most important research areas in Iranian accounting journals.Reviewing the publication trend of papers in each of the popular research areas suggests that the topics of public sector accounting, auditing, financial reporting and corporate social responsibility, management accounting, banking and information systems, and accounting education and research follow a growing publication trend. In contrast, the topics of financial accounting, capital market, and finance and investment show a downward publication trend, and the topic of corporate governance continues a steady publication trend.

The results reveal that some research areas such as accounting information systems, public sector accounting, and accounting education and research, compared to other research areas, have been given less attention since not many attempts have been made to publish papers in these areas; thus, it is suggested that scholars pay more careful attention to journals’ science and publishing policies.