Knowledge Landscapes of the Journal of Marine and Island Cultures: Insights from Topic Modeling

This study analyzes the research trends and knowledge structure of the Journal of Marine and Island Cultures (JMIC) from its inception in 2012 to 2024, based on a dataset of 266 published articles. Titles, abstracts, and keywords were integrated into a unified text field and processed using the Orange Data Mining platform. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied, with both Perplexity and Coherence metrics employed to determine the optimal number of topics. The results revealed six major thematic clusters: (1) marine heritage and ecological diversity, (2) tourism, sustainability, and pandemic impact, (3) governance of marine resources and resilience, (4) marine pollution and environmental crisis, (5) migration, gender, and coloniality, and (6) fisheries, livelihoods, and climate change. Temporal analysis indicated a clear evolution: the early phase (2012–2015) was dominated by heritage and tourism studies, the middle phase (2016–2019) by fisheries and governance, and the later phase (2020–2024) by research on environmental crises and the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings demonstrate that JMIC has not remained confined to a single disciplinary focus but has progressively evolved by incorporating global challenges and interdisciplinary academic discourse. The study contributes in three ways: it maps the interdisciplinary knowledge landscape of JMIC, identifies thematic shifts over time, and highlights the journal’s role as a bridge between cultural, ecological, social, and policy-oriented research. Ultimately, the results suggest that JMIC serves not only as a platform for documenting island and marine cultures but also as an academic hub linking global agendas and regional contexts, thereby enhancing international scholarly and policy dialogue.