(Text) Mining the LANDscape: Themes and trends over 40 years of Landscape and Urban Planning

• Diverse research themes coalesce after two initial decades of publication.
• Stable clusters reflect three major knowledge domains: human dimensions, landscape planning and analysis, and urban ecology.
• Emerging themes and “hot topics” are identified along the edges and intersection of clusters.

In commemoration of the journal's 40th anniversary, the co-editor explores themes and trends covered by Landscape and Urban Planning and its parent journals through a qualitative comparison of co-occurrence term maps generated from the text corpora of its abstracts across the four decadal periods of publication. Cluster maps generated from the VOSviewer program reveal a coalescence of concepts for the last two decades along three knowledge domains: human dimensions, landscape analysis and planning, and urban ecology. Citation impact “heat maps” offer additional clues about emerging and high-impact topics. The editor assesses these findings with respect to the journal's aims and scope and offers some thoughts on future directions for research.

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