While topic modeling is a more sophisticated method for understanding what a document is about and the shape of a corpus of documents, unigrams (or ngrams, as shown in Google Ngram Viewer) can provide a quick and dirty picture of trends. This visualization uses sparklines in order to get a general sense of how the most important words track over time in AJS Review. It is important to remember that many “high noise” words have been eliminated from consideration.
Nearly all of the most popular words over the entire corpus have dropped in more recent years, which is intriguing.
We then wanted to hone in on the trends over just the last five years of our data (2010-2014). Here are the trends for research articles:
And for book reviews:
