Airline business research trends from 2015 to 2024 using integrated corpus- and judgement-based methods

The growth of the airline industry supports globalisation by connecting regions and promoting trade and tourism. Therefore, understanding research directions is essential for guiding future studies and supporting industry development. This study explored research related to the airline business to identify trends that have emerged over the past decade, using a mixed-methods approach combining corpus-based and judgement-based analyses. The data were collected from research articles published in Scopus-indexed journals between 2015 and 2024, specifically from the abstracts. In total, 10,901 abstracts were compiled into the Airline Business Research Abstract Corpus (ABRAC), comprising 2,080,248 tokens. A corpus-based approach was applied using keyword analysis, lexical profiling, and lemmatisation to identify key trends in airline business research. Subsequently, a judgement-based approach was applied to provide a clearer understanding of these trends based on excluding unrelated words and classifying relevant words into five themes: research topics, research intentions, related concepts, research participants, and research methods. The findings demonstrated that annual trends in airline business research were reflected through the keywords that had been categorised into the five main themes. These results should help researchers to design their studies, whether they choose to follow major trends or explore less prominent areas, based on the revealed patterns of research interest. In addition, this should enable them to keep pace with developments in the field.