Keeping Up with Psychological Science: PsychTopics – A Computational Assistance Tool for Researchers, Students, Journalists, and Policy‐Makers (Slides)

The increasing pace of digitalization and globalization has led to a significant increase in the amount of information available in the field of science, including psychology. To help researchers and other interested parties navigate this information overload, we developed PsychTopics (www.PsychTopics.org), an online tool that uses machine learning to identify research topics and trends in psychology literature from the German-speaking countries. The topics are continuously detected with RollingLDA – a variant of topic modeling that enables sequential modeling of dynamically growing corpora and ensures time consistency of resulting time series. PsychTopics is an interactive R Shiny App that features six sections: Start, Browse Topics, Popular by Year, Hot/Cold, Topic Evolution, and Methods. Each section provides different views on the psychological research topics and trends. While ‚Start‘ presents general information and the currently most popular topics, ‚Browse Topics‘ provides interactive trend plots of all individually selected topics. By clicking on the respective points of the lines in the diagram, details of the particular topic can be accessed. The section ‚Popular by Year‘ allows a close look at the most popular topics of each year between 1980 and 2022. ‚Hot/Cold‘ illustrates the topics with the largest increase and the largest decrease in publications within a self-definable time period. Additionally, the section ‚Topic Evolution‘ allows the user to inspect changes in topic content over time. Each of the sections includes hyperlinks to the free literature search in the PSYNDEX database. PsychTopics can be useful for researchers, students, journalists, policy-makers, and the interested public. For journalists and policy-makers, it might be of interest to determine the extent to which publications address topics of social relevance. Early career researchers can use the information on the journals that have published the most on the topics to find suitable journals for their own research papers. The proportion of empirical studies also indicates topics that may be suitable for quantitative research syntheses (meta-analyses). Overall, PsychTopics can be a helpful tool for exploring psychological research topics and trends, providing a bird’s-eye view of psychological science that is accessible to everyone. By using advanced text mining techniques, PsychTopics helps users keep track of the ever-growing amount of research publications in psychology and stay up-to-date on the latest trends and topics.