Skip to contentScholarGate
LibraryBookshelfDeskReview StudioAssistant
Sign in
Structural Topic Model/Evidence
Method evidence record

Structural Topic Model

The Structural Topic Model (STM) is a text-as-data method that discovers latent themes in a corpus while letting document metadata — party, time, gender, treatment condition — shape those themes. Introduced by Roberts, Stewart, Tingley and colleagues in 2014, it generalizes correlated topic modeling so that topic prevalence (how much a document is about a topic) and topic content (the words used to express a topic) can both depend on covariates. The result is a single model that simultaneously estimates topics and how their use varies across known groups, with uncertainty.

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Source record

Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Structural Topic Model (Topic Modeling with Document-Level Covariates)
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / political-science
  • Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., Tingley, D., Lucas, C., Leder-Luis, J., Gadarian, S. K., Albertson, B., & Rand, D. G. (2014). Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses. American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 1064–1082. · DOI 10.1111/ajps.12103
  • Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., & Tingley, D. (2019). stm: An R Package for Structural Topic Models. Journal of Statistical Software, 91(2), 1–40. · DOI 10.18637/jss.v091.i02
  • Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297. · DOI 10.1093/pan/mps028
Open full method

Curated claims

Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.

No curated claims yet

This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.

Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyDictionary-Based Text Analysis in Politicsmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.See alsoLDA Topic Modelmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familySupervised Text Classificationmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.See alsoTopic Modelingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Used in the same domainWordfish Scalingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

3 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

Actions

Open method page
ScholarGate

A content-first reference library for research methods — what each one is, how it works, and where it comes from.

Open data (CC-BY)

Explore

  • Library
  • Search the library…
  • Browse by field
  • Fields
  • Journey
  • Compare
  • Which method?

Reference

  • Subjects
  • Atlas
  • Glossary
  • Methodology
  • Philosophy

Your tools

  • Bookshelf
  • Desk
  • Chat

Company

  • About
  • Pricing
  • Contact
  • Suggest a method

Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

© 2026 ScholarGate · A research-method reference library
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • Terms
  • Delete account