Citation frequency is an important factor in evaluating journal quality and is used as a measure of journal impact. The citation index of a paper plays an important role in linking papers with groups of other academic papers, forming a huge and complex network. This study examines the intellectual structure of apparel research through the bibliometric citation analysis of The Research Journal of the Costume Culture (RJCC). In order to analyze the changes in the intellectual structure of the RJCC, we used the Korea Citation Index’s (KCI) data (highly citing journals and highly cited journals). The NodeXL, a social network analysis tool, was used to examine the connection structure between journals. In order to identify the academic influence of the RJCC, we used the KCI journal citation index. Our findings indicate that the RJCC has a high centrality index among the clothing-oriented journals in the same life sciences field. A look at the journals citing the RJCC and the journals cited within the RJCC also showed that more journals of diverse fields have been recently linked through their citations. This suggests that a convergence of interdisciplinary research is underway in the field of clothing. As a result of examining international journals cited in the RJCC, it was confirmed that they were cited in prominent international journals in various fields.

A trend analysis of research articles in a field of knowledge is significant because it can help in finding out the structural characteristics of the field and the future direction of research through observing change in a time series. We identified the structural characteristics and trends in text data (keywords) gathered from research articles which in itself is an important task in various research areas. The titles and keywords were crawled from research articles published from 2016 to 2018 in the Research Journal of the Costume Culture (RJCC), one of the representative Korean journal in the field of clothing and textile. After we extracted data comprising English titles and keywords from 195 published articles, we transformed it into a 1-mode matrix. We used measures from network analysis (i.e., link, strength, and degree centrality) for evaluating meaningful patterns and trends in the research on clothing and textile. NodeXL was used for visualizing the semantic network. This study observed change in the clothing and textile research trend. In addition to covering the core areas of the field, the subjects of research have been diversifying with every passing year and have evolved onto a developmental direction. The most studied area in articles published by the RJCC was fashion retailing/consumer psychology while aesthetic/historic and fashion industry/policy studies were covered to a more limited extent. We observed that most of the studies reflecting the identity of RJCC share subject keywords to a significant extent.