Process / pipelineReview / evidence synthesis

Thematic Evolution Analysis — Tracking How Research Themes Change Over Time

Thematic evolution analysis is a bibliometric technique that divides a body of literature into consecutive time periods and tracks how research themes emerge, consolidate, split, merge, or disappear across those periods. By combining co-word analysis, clustering, and strategic diagrams for each time slice, it produces a dynamic picture of a field's intellectual development rather than a static snapshot.

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Sources

  1. Cobo, M. J., Lopez-Herrera, A. G., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2011). Science mapping software tools: Review, analysis, and cooperative study among tools. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(7), 1382–1402. DOI: 10.1002/asi.21525
  2. Cobo, M. J., Lopez-Herrera, A. G., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2011). An approach for detecting, quantifying, and visualizing the evolution of a research field: A practical application to the Fuzzy Sets Theory field. Journal of Informetrics, 5(1), 146–166. DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2010.10.002

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Referenced by

ScholarGateThematic Evolution Analysis (Thematic Evolution Analysis in Science Mapping). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/scientometrics/thematic-evolution-analysis