Tracing the Evolution of Research Topics in an Academic Genealogy Graph

This study aims to examine how changing the research topics affect the aca- demic productivity of a research group. We selected researchers from the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) that constitutes more than 250K researchers. We gathered data on publications, citation, and H-index from different sources, which are reliable measures of research performance and productivity for both individual researchers and research groups. Subse- quently, we formed groups of researchers and utilized a topic model to in- vestigate the evolution of topic distribution within these groups over time. We conducted experiments to evaluate the impact of frequent changes in research topics on academic output. To achieve this, we analyzed the cor- relation between metrics such as publication count, citation, H-index, and variance in topic distribution. Our findings suggest that there is a weak negative correlation between topic deviation and academic outputs, such as citation, h-index, and publication, across research groups. However, upon further analysis by grouping the researcher groups based on their topic devi- ation values, we discovered that research groups with a consistent focus on a specific set of topics demonstrate better academic output in terms of pub- lications, citation, and collaboration with co-authors, compared to research groups that frequently shift topics.