This study aims to analyze how the thematic structure of ship finance research has evolved before and after the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping by employing text mining techniques. For this purpose, academic articles related to ship finance indexed in the Korean Citation Index (KCI) were collected and analyzed, using English titles, keywords, and abstracts published between 2010 and 2025. The research methodology includes keyword frequency analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. To compare the structural characteristics of topic distributions across periods, Shannon entropy and the Herfindahl - Hirschman Index (HHI) were employed. In addition, a common LDA framework was applied to examine changes in average topic proportions before and after the bankruptcy under a unified topic structure, based on which topics were classified as rising or declining. The results indicate that, prior to the bankruptcy, ship finance research exhibited a multi-layered structure in which diverse themes - such as financial market variables and legal and contractual frameworks - were relatively evenly distributed. In contrast, the post-bankruptcy period shows a shift toward a more concentrated structure, with research attention increasingly focused on a limited number of core themes, including financial risk management, policy, and industrial restructuring. These findings suggest that the Hanjin Shipping bankruptcy marked a critical turning point that reshaped ship finance research toward a more strategic and policy-oriented focus, and they provide meaningful implications for future ship finance research and policy design.
Lee et al. (Sat,) studied this question.