Topical Features and Their Dynamics of China’s Humanities and Social Sciences: A Topic Modelling and Collocation Analysis Approach

Abstract

In the past decades, China’s humanities and social sciences (HSS) have shown their great potential for international influence, drawing attention of scholars across diverse disciplines. Although a substantial amount of research on China’s HSS has been conducted from various perspectives, text-grounded analyses of the topical features are limited. Therefore, this study aims to combine topic modelling and collocation analysis to explore the topical features and their dynamics of China’s HSS, based on a large-scale corpus of approximately 379 million characters. Results show that the mainstream topics of China’s HSS are Marxism, Economics, and History, which have prevailed all through the periods. Regarding the diachronic changes, the topics have become more and more diversified, and the focus within the same topic would shift as time goes on. This study depicts both static snapshots and dynamic flows of the topical features of China’s HSS. It also sheds light on a deeper understanding of the patterns and dynamics of China’s HSS for HSS researchers, linguistic analysts, and policymakers.