The Ecological Society of Australia was founded in 1959, and the society’s journal was first published in 1976. To examine how research published in the society’s journal has changed over this time, we used text mining to quantify themes and trends in the body of work published by the Australian Journal of Ecology and Austral Ecology from 1976 to 2019. We used topic models to identify 30 ‘topics’ within 2778 full‐text articles in 246 issues of the journal, followed by mixed modelling to identify topics with above‐average or below‐average popularity in terms of the number of publications or citations that they contain. We found high inter‐decadal turnover in research topics, with an early emphasis on highly specific ecosystems or processes giving way to a modern emphasis on community, spatial and fire ecology, invasive species and statistical modelling. Despite an early focus on Australian research, papers discussing South American ecosystems are now among the fastest‐growing and most frequently cited topics in the journal. Topics that were growing fastest in publication rates were not always the same as those with high citation rates. Our results provide a systematic breakdown of the topics that Austral Ecology authors and editors have chosen to research, publish and cite through time, providing a valuable window into the historical and emerging foci of the journal.

中文翻译：

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量化在44年的澳大利亚生态学中主题受欢迎程度的变化

澳大利亚生态学会成立于1959年，该学会的期刊于1976年首次出版。为了研究这段时期在该学会的期刊上发表的研究的变化，我们使用文本挖掘来量化发表的论文的主题和趋势。由澳大利亚生态与南方生态杂志从1976年到2019年。我们使用主题模型在该期刊246期中的2778篇全文文章中确定了30个“主题”，然后使用混合模型来确定流行度高于平均水平或低于平均水平的主题它们包含的出版物或引文。我们发现研究主题的年代际转换率很高，早期强调的是高度特定的生态系统或过程，而现代的则是社区，空间和火灾生态，入侵物种和统计模型。尽管早期关注澳大利亚的研究，但有关南美生态系统的论文现已成为该杂志中增长最快，引用次数最多的主题之一。出版速度最快的主题并不总是与引用率高的主题相同。澳大利亚生态学的作者和编辑选择进行时间的研究，出版和引用，为了解该杂志的历史和新兴焦点提供了宝贵的窗口。