Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to derive clues for the franchise industry to overcome difficulties such as various legal regulations and social responsibility demands and to continuously develop by analyzing the research trends related to franchises published in Korea. Research design, data and methodology: As a result of searching for 'franchise' in ScienceON, abstracts were collected from papers published in domestic academic journals from 1994 to June 2021. Keywords were extracted from the abstracts of 1,110 valid papers, and after preprocessing, keyword analysis, TF-IDF analysis, and topic modeling using LDA algorithm, along with trend analysis of the top 20 words in TF-IDF by year group was carried out using the R-package. Results: As a result of keyword analysis, it was found that businesses and brands were the subjects of research related to franchises, and interest in service and satisfaction was considerable, and food and coffee were prominently studied as industries. As a result of TF-IDF calculation, it was found that brand, satisfaction, franchisor, and coffee were ranked at the top. As a result of LDA-based topic modeling, a total of 12 topics including "growth strategy" were derived and visualized with LDAvis. On the other hand, the areas of Topic 1 (growth strategy) and Topic 9 (organizational culture), Topic 4 (consumption experience) and Topic 6 (contribution and loyalty), Topic 7 (brand image) and Topic 10 (commercial area) overlap significantly. Finally, the trend analysis results for the top 20 keywords with high TF-IDF showed that 10 keywords such as quality, brand, food, and trust would be more utilized overall. Conclusions: Through the results of this study, the direction of interest in the franchise industry was confirmed, and it was found that it was necessary to find a clue for continuous growth through research in more diverse fields. And it was also considered an important finding to suggest a technique that can supplement the problems of topic trend analysis. Therefore, the results of this study show that researchers will gain significant insights from the perspectives related to the selection of research topics, and practitioners from the perspectives related to future franchise changes.