What About Corruption? A Text Analytics Method for a Scoping Literature Review

Corruption is a social phenomenon born with the evolution of humanity, causing serious and global problems in the form of social inequality, the precariousness of public services and untrust in government actions. Transparency is a meaningful action against corruption by providing more precise and complete information so that society can be aware of government actions. The aim of this paper is to explore how often and in which context corruption and transparency have been investigated in national and international literature by a keyword-string search method of terms ‘corruption’ and ‘transparency’ across an academic electronic database (i.e. Scopus) using a method of the brand score measurement proposed by the SBS (Semantic Brand Score) that combines social network analysis and semantic analysis on the words’ co-occurrence network. Both words are treated as brands whose importance is analysed by the number of occurrences in the discourse and its embeddedness in text data and heterogeneity in its text associations. A large text files containing over five million of words has been submitted by SBS metrics. The nouns frequently associated with corruption and transparency will help us to discover a set of socio-economic indicators of corruption we will use for a next study of this multidimensional phenomenon.