The Topic Analysis of Hospice Care Research Using Co-word Analysis and GHSOM

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to propose a multi-layer topic map analysis of palliative care research using co-word analysis of informetrics with Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM). The topic map illustrated the delicate intertwining of subject areas and provided a more explicit illustration of the concepts within each subject area. We applied GHSOM, a text-mining Neural Networks tool, to obtain a hierarchical topic map. The result of the topic map may indicate that the subject area of health care science and service played an importance role in multidiscipline within the research related to palliative care. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.