Text Mining the Variety of Trends in the Field of Simulation Modeling Research

Simulation modeling as a research field is engaging and multidisciplinary, drawing on a wide range of techniques and tools. It has reached its 60th anniversary amassing to an enormous corpus of literature. To date, many studies explored its advancements in specific disciplines. This paper aims to present a more structured and cross-disciplinary approach by identifying trends and extracting patterns from text files using text mining techniques. For that purpose, abstracts from over 5,000 papers were downloaded from the WoS database and analyzed. The results are complemented and visualized through the process of science mapping and positioned to existing frameworks (Plan-Do-Check-Act and Bloom's taxonomy in particular). The source with the most journal papers related to simulation modeling has been Ecological modelling; however, recent research focus has shifted to healthcare issues. Overall, the results confirm the relevancy of the simulation modeling field and acknowledge the trend among research papers towards the highest cognitive level of Bloom's taxonomy - knowledge.