Mapping the Evolution of Social Innovation in Scientific Publications: A Topic Modelling and Text Mining Approach

Abstract Objective To trace how academic discourse on social innovation has evolved from 2000 – mid-2024 in numbers and leading topics by applying a special topic modelling and text mining methodology. Data & Sources 4,703 full-text journal articles retrieved from Science Direct. Methods Literature review and PDF text extracted with PyPDF2 and pdfplumber; cleaned and tokenised in R; topic modelling performed with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (ldatuning-optimised); temporal and correlation analyses visualised via tidyverse. Results The number of publications increased significantly from 16 (in 2000) to 573 (in 2021), stabilizing thereafter. Seven dominant topics emerged: renewable energy, environmental/resource management, smart-city governance, sustainable food systems, corporate strategy, academic-method studies, and social-governance structures. “Social” and “innovation” became the top word pair after 2006; energy-related terms surged after 2016. Surprisingly, topics typically considered ‘social’ have not dominated the social innovation discourse in scientific communities compared to the aforementioned dominant topics. Discussion Our results largely confirm existing findings from literature reviews and affirm the interdisciplinary, vague, contested, and still intensively evolving nature of social innovation. Dominant social innovation topics in scientific papers reference to social innovation topics in global political and policy documents, notably from the EU (from 2013 onwards) and the 2015 UN SDGs agenda, also emphasising collaboration between scientific, business, political and non-governmental stakeholders, and can thus serve as scientific, evidence-based advocacy for other stakeholders involved in social innovation processes. Conclusions Social innovation research is now an established, systemic, and broadly interdisciplinary field of study, focusing on sustainability, emerging technologies, and governance topics. It is tightly connected with the political and policy agendas of leading international organisations, as well as business and non-governmental ones. Implications Findings guide scholars to under-explored social-related content and niches (such as governance and, especially, equity topics) and help policymakers and other stakeholders involved in social innovation processes locate evidence-based approaches and clusters when designing their socially innovative responses, interventions, solutions, and measures.