Tracking Our Footsteps

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We conduct a systematic reading of all articles published in the past 30 years in three U.S.-based general planning journals, Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA), Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER), and Journal of Planning Literature (JPL), using latent Dirichlet allocation, a text mining technique. We find that certain research themes remain important in the past 3 decades, such as planning process, planning methods, and land use/growth management, whereas others have lost their prominent status, such as planning theory and planning education. New fields such as food systems have emerged during the study period. Editorial regimes appear to be associated with theme dynamics.

Takeaway for practice: In this study we demonstrate a text mining method to effectively summarize a large amount of text data and track planning researchers’ footsteps in the study of planning issues reflected from published research articles. We identify past and emerging research trends in the studied journals that can help scholars situate their work in the literature and practitioners find collaboration opportunities. It also helps professional associations such as the American Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) and the APA open up new conference tracks and/or specialization groups/divisions so they can reflect the ever-changing interests of their memberships in a timely manner.