Potential implementation of subject areas in Malaysia's research assessment Co-word analysis study

In the education environment, subject area is one of important matter since primary school to higher learning institution. Subject area exists in other developed countries for research assessment. But, apparently, some of country didn't apply the subject area in its research assessment's framework. It is important to have the subject area in the assessment's framework in order to know the development and progress of subject area. Therefore, in this study, one of mechanism used to produce potential subject area is by manipulated selected bibliometric element which called as co-words analysis. This study is focused on 20 year time span started from 1995 and 2015 for Malaysian's researcher's publication. All data were extracted from selected database, Scopus. In Scopus, data were sorted from the highest cited publication. We used a powerful tool namely as Vosviewer to help us to extract the occurrence and potential words that hidden in publication. As a result, our result produced 7 clusters of potential subject area. In this study, we performed correlation analysis between our clusters with selected ranking in order to relationship between these two variable. The analysis results gave us a valuable information that there are potential to implement the subject area in the assessment. Another valuable information from our result is the potential to combine two method in assess the assessment, which is by using the bibliometric element with human judgement. The details for our research were divided into sections.