1. A computer-implemented method of generating a stop word list for information retrieval and analysis, the method comprising: providing a corpus of documents and a plurality of keywords; constructing a term list of all terms in the corpus of documents; determining keyword adjacency frequency of each term in the corpus of documents, wherein the keyword adjacency frequency comprises the number of times a term occurs adjacent to one of the keywords; determining keyword frequency of each term in the corpus of documents, wherein the keyword frequency comprises the number of times a term occurs within one of the keywords; excluding from the term list each term having a ratio of keyword adjacency frequency to keyword frequency that is less than a predetermined value; and truncating the term list based on a predetermined criteria to form the stop word list.