• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.195-213
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• 2013

This study aims at establishing the identity of teaching Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) domain by using journal profiling and co-word analysis in comparison with the relevant and adjacent domains. Firstly, by extracting and comparing topic terms, we calculate the similarity of academic journals of the three domains, KFL, teaching Korean as a Native Language (KNL), and Korean Linguistics (KL). The result shows that the journals of KFL form a distinct cluster from the others. The profiling analysis and co-word analysis are then conducted to visualize the relationship among all the three domains in order to uncover the characteristics of KFL. The findings show that KFL is more similar to KNL than to KL. Finally, the comparison of knowledge structures of these three domains based on the co-word analysis demonstrates the uniqueness of KFL as an independent domain in relation with the other relevant domains.