Digital Intellectual History of Modern Korean Literary Studies: Bibliometric Analysis of KCI and OpenAlex Data Sets
Date:
This short paper traces the scholarly reception of modern Korean literature through a computational analysis of bibliometric data from the Korea Citation Index and OpenAlex, spanning 2000-2024.
Author
Byungjun Kim and Yongsoo Kim
Abstract
How have modern Korean literary studies developed as a field, and how have they become legible to a global scholarly audience? This short paper approaches these questions computationally, drawing on OpenAlex records together with roughly 17,000 articles indexed in the Korea Citation Index (KCI) between 2002 and 2024. We examine three dimensions of the field: its topical evolution, modeled through structural topic modeling; its institutional patterns, which reveal an increasingly transnational base of contributors; and its citation networks, which show how Korean literary scholarship has been integrated into broader literary discourse. A parallel analysis of South Korean academic journals — in particular The Journal of English Language and Literature — maps how English literary studies mediated domestic engagement with world literature across seven decades. The findings foreground a multifaceted interaction between local and global perspectives: English literature helped shape South Korean cultural discourse, while Korean literature has come to participate more directly in global academic conversation. We read the 2024 Nobel Prize awarded to Han Kang not as a rupture but as an outcome of this sustained, cumulative scholarly engagement with Korean literary traditions.