Twenty-five Years of Research in Social Networks: Evolution of Topics between 1997 and 2021 Based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

The social network field has suffered significant transformations in the last 25 years, particularly with the introduction of social networks online, as well as incorporated studies from many other knowledge fields that adopt the social network approach in their analyses. This paper offers an overview of the evolution of research topics in this field between 1997 and 2021 based on topic modeling. The methodology used draws from the Scopus database, considering time windows of a year and using the software, Mallet. Seven topics are obtained, whose evolution over time is described. It is concluded that the topics related to social media and social networks online have been studied with special intensity in the last years.