Automatic Bibliometric Analysis of Research Literature in Adult Education

Due to the vast volume of publications in nowadays research environment, methods for analyzing, organizing, and accessing information from large databases are in great need. Through appropriate analytic tools, competitive intelligence can be revealed to enhance the organization or individual performance. This article will show how a free software package called CATAR carry on the analysis about the literature of the Adult Education science. Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ) is a scholarly forum of research and theory in adult education. The field of adult education is broad-based and inter disciplinary, during 1990 to 2010 having 672 papers from the ISI Web of Knowledge database was collected. The data analyzed include the distribution of authors' countries, topical clusters, the most cited references, the productivity rankings, and others to provide information for further study. Our analysis scenario also suggests a feasible way of analyzing other similar data for readers interesting in literature mining applications.