Identifying Information Technology Research Trends through Text Mining of NSF Awards

Information Technology (IT) is recognized as an independent and unique research field. However, there has been ambiguity and difficulty in identifying and differentiating IT research from other close variations. Given this context, this paper aimed to explore the roots of the Information Technology (IT) research domain by conducting a large-scale text mining analysis of 50,780 abstracts from awarded NSF CISE grants from 1985 to 2024. We categorized the awards based on their program content, labeling human-centric programs as IT research programs and infrastructure-centric programs as other research programs based on the IT definitions in the literature. This novel approach helped us identify the core concepts of IT research and compare the similarities and differences between IT research and other research areas. The results showed that IT differentiates itself from other close variations by focusing more on the needs of users, organizations, and societies.