Content Analysis and Application of Zipf's Law in Computer Science Literature

The technique of content analysis is used in construction of thesaurus, subject headings and designing classification schemes for efficient organisation of knowledge in the libraries. Moreover, content analysis is also useful in analyzing the user queries and in designing search formulation. The purpose of paper is to analyze, evaluate and apply Zipf's Law in Computer Science through the content analysis of literature published in ACM journals. The study is focused on the analysis of 13, 053 unique keywords out of 107,467 total keywords retrieved from 1954 to 2008 from Journals. Further, a total of 748 keywords have been chosen for this study which occurred > 20 times. The distribution of keywords shows that the studies have been conducted in a large number of areas of study in computer science. Further, computer science research has been covering all the aspects very well as occurrences of almost all the keywords have increasing trend. However, Zipf's Law only approximates in patches, not in the entire data set.