Using Textual Analysis Tools to Identify Trends in Privacy Concern Research

Text mining is a research method that uses interdisciplinary techniques to identify patterns and trends in unstructured data and can be used to detect research trends and developments in various fields. Thus, this study attempts to identify research trends in the issue of privacy concern (PC), focusing on the differences between the first two decades of the 21st century. This is done by applying an automated textual analysis tool (Voyant Tools) on a vast corpora of academic papers conducted on this field. We found that while the first examined decade of PC research focused on commerce and marketing issues, there was much more research emphasis on the social dimension of privacy in the second decade. This difference was explained by the technological developments that were prominent in the respective decades. The research provided support for the use of textual analysis of academic literature as a tool to identify research trends in various fields, including technologically-oriented fields.