Understanding Themes in Postsecondary Research Using Topic Modeling and Journal Abstracts

As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles by topic area. Instead, we use topic modeling to understand the subject areas that scholars investigate, as well as changes in these subject areas over time. Topic modeling assumes that a group of abstracts contains a mix of topics that are hidden (or latent) because we can only observe abstracts and the words that appear within abstracts, but not the underlying topics. Each abstract and word are then viewed as having a probability of belonging to a topic or subject area. Our data consist of abstracts from the set of articles published in The Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Review of Higher Education between 1991 and 2020. We find 24 main topics in the postsecondary literature in the past three decades. The most common topics in the literature during the past three decades are research usage and research methodology (18%), followed by college access (9%), identities and experiences (9%), student engagement (9%), and academic careers (8%). The research topics that became more popular over time are all student related: identities and experiences, college access, financial aid, student experiences with diversity, and student success. Topics that became less popular over time include academic misconduct, research usage and research methodology, and academic careers.