Research trends in text mining: Semantic network and main path analysis of selected journals

•Semantic network and main path analysis were conducted on 1856 studies on text mining.•Using text mining as research topic or method has increased fast and widely applied.•Revealed keywords of text mining study in the 1980s and 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s.•Identified which papers make a significant academic contribution on text mining.