Comparative Analysis of Domestic and International Research Trends of Exercise Psychology : A Topic Modeling Approach

Purpose: This study examines the evolving research landscape of exercise psychology—a subfield of sports psychology—by comparing domestic and international trends and identifying directions for future research.<br/> Method: A total of 2,244 articles were analyzed, including 573 published in South Korea and 1,671 from international sources between 2000 and 2025. Titles and abstracts were preprocessed using standard text-mining techniques, followed by TF-IDF-based keyword extraction and visualization with word clouds to identify prominent research themes. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was employed for topic modeling, with the optimal number of topics determined using the coherence score.<br/> Results: Eight key topics were identified in both the domestic and international corpora. To explore temporal dynamics, the 25-year span was divided into five intervals. The results revealed that, in South Korean research, psychological effects (Topic 1) consistently dominated across all periods. In contrast, international studies exhibited a more balanced distribution across topics, reflecting broader thematic diversity.<br/> Conclusion: By mapping the conceptual evolution of health exercise psychology, this study offers empirical insights into how research priorities have shifted across different contexts. These findings provide a foundation for scholars to expand the thematic scope of future research and contribute to the development of new paradigms within the field.