A decade of research in statistics: a topic model approach

Topic models are a well known clustering approach for textual data, which provides promising applications in the bibliometric context for the purpose of discovering scientific topics and trends in a corpus of scientific publications. However, topic models per se provide poorly descriptive metadata featuring the discovered clusters of publications and they are not related to the other important metadata usually available with publications, such as authors affiliation, publication venue, and publication year. In this paper, we propose a methodological approach to topic modeling and post-processing of topic models results to the end of describing in depth a field of research over time. In particular, we work on a selection of publications from the international statistical literature, we propose an approach that allows us to identify sophisticated topic descriptors, and we analyze the links between topics and their temporal evolution.