This study analyzes the research trends of seven Korean traditional dances designated as national intangible cultural heritages that are given social values and cultural symbolism as a historical heritage of the country. Research papers were collected by using the seven dances as the search keyword and analyzed through text mining methods. These collected papers investigated frequency analysis, entity name recognition, connection centrality, and N-gram, focusing on their titles and publication years. For the final analysis, 1,043 articles published in academic journals and 1,065 thesis and dissertations in RISS were used.

As a result of the analysis, there is a large difference in the number of papers, depending on what genre an intangible heritage belongs to. It can be also found that research on traditional dances has gradually decreased. Many studies have shown the tendency to concentrate on the interpretation, preservation, and transmission of traditional dances. In the meantime, more studies are being conducted to develop or popularize Korean traditional dances as educational programs and contents.