Tracking Academic Topic Evolution From the Perspective of Author Interest Shifts

Understanding how academic topics evolve over time is essential for tracking scientific progress and identifying emerging trends. This study proposes a new framework for analyzing topic evolution based on the shifting interests of individual authors, whose evolving research choices play a key role in shaping topic trajectories. By leveraging a time-sequenced learning approach that incorporates author information, the framework captures how topics emerge, grow, decline, and reemerge. Improving traditional topic modeling approaches that rely solely on textual patterns, our framework explicitly models the temporal dynamics of individual authors' topic engagement, providing a micro-level lens on macro-level topic changes. As a case study, we apply this framework to the Scientometrics field using data from 1978 to 2024, and construct a topic evolutionary map that reveals strong interconnections among bibliometrics, research evaluation, and related methodologies. The analysis also reveals that despite the persistence of foundational topics like citation analysis and knowledge management, which are reinforced by sustained author interest, only two genuinely emerging topics were identified, suggesting that while author interests evolve, they tend to favor established areas over the exploration of entirely new directions.