Corpus Linguistics Research Trends from 1997 to 2016: A Co-Citation Analysis

Corpus linguistics is one of the fastest growing areas of linguistics because of its interface with neighboring academic disciplines and the data-processing capability of a large amount of empirical linguistic data. This study reviews research trends from the last two decades within the corpus linguistics fields. Specifically, the study applied systematic citation analysis procedures to summarize and identify the salient research themes and publications from citation-reference data of peer-reviewed research articles published and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) between 1997 and 2016. The co-citation analysis of 5,600 research articles and their 172,352 references indicated that, over the four time spans of five years, the corpus linguistics research articles have cited works ranging from general linguistics journal titles to specialized journal titles and individual books. In terms of the research themes of corpus linguistics, the topics of the linguistics research have rapidly changed over the time span. More recently, the development of web-based large monitor corpora and corpus analysis software has contributed significantly to the dynamic and productive interaction of research in the discipline. This may indicate the evolving and juvenile nature of corpus linguistics and its possibility of growing into a multi-disciplinary field. Although there are exceptions to all of the research patterns found in the co-citation analysis, the current study also discusses the most up-to-date research trends and the future directions of corpus linguistics