The purposes of this study are to examine the meaning of education and research domain in educational
research by using semantic network analysis and to explore prospective research topics for future studies
under the already studied materials. Data were collected from the titles of The Korean Educational
Research Journal that were published from 1988 to 2013, and analyzed accordingly through KrKwic and
NetDraw research tools. First, titles of research papers were classified into separate morphemes and
analyzed through KrKwic system. Pedagogical topics then were extracted and classified from ‘reference
titles’, ‘common key words’, ‘34 morpheme common key words’, and ‘key words in period’. The relations
among these key words were then interpreted by their closeness centrality and betweenness centrality,
subnetwork, structural hole according to NetDraw system.
Research findings first showed that the term, ‘education’ was a compound word mixed with the ‘school’
domain and ‘learning’ domain. Second, such pedagogical terms that had been used extensively by 2013
were mainly from the fields of ‘educational psychology’, ‘curriculum’, and ‘educational sociology’. Third,
topics such as ‘academic achievement’, ‘efficacy’, ‘educational environment changes’, or ‘ideological education’
were suggested as prospective research topics for future studies.