ORGANISING KEYWORDS IN A WEB SEARCH ENVIRONMENT: A METHODOLOGY BASED ON CO-WORD ANALYSIS Organising keywords in a web search environment: a methodology based on co-word analysis

The rapid development of the Internet and World Wide Web has caused some critical problem for information retrieval. Researchers have made several attempts to solve these problems. Thesauri and subject heading lists as traditional information retrieval tools have been criticised for their efficiency to tackle these newly emerging problems. This paper proposes an information retrieval tool generated by cocitation analysis, comprising keyword clusters with relationships based on the co-occurrences of keywords in the literature. Such a tool can play the role of an associative thesaurus that can provide information about the keywords in a domain that might be useful for information searching and query expansion.