Quantifying shifts in topic popularity over 44 years of Austral Ecology

Abstract

The Ecological Society of Australia was founded in 1959, and the society’s journal wasfirst pub-lished in 1976. To examine how research published in the society’s journal has changed over this time, we usedtext mining to quantify themes and trends in the body of work published by theAustralian Journal of EcologyandAustral Ecologyfrom 1976 to 2019. We used topic models to identify 30‘topics’within 2778 full-text articles in246 issues of the journal, followed by mixed modelling to identify topics with above-average or below-averagepopularity in terms of the number of publications or citations that they contain. We found high inter-decadalturnover in research topics, with an early emphasis on highly specific ecosystems or processes giving way to amodern emphasis on community, spatial andfire ecology, invasive species and statistical modelling. Despite anearly focus on Australian research, papers discussing South American ecosystems are now among the fastest-growing and most frequently cited topics in the journal. Topics that were growing fastest in publication rateswere not always the same as those with high citation rates. Our results provide a systematic breakdown of thetopics thatAustral Ecologyauthors and editors have chosen to research, publish and cite through time, providinga valuable window into the historical and emerging foci of the journal.