Half a Century of NVSQ: Thematic Stability Across Years and Editors

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand how the scholarship of the nonprofit sector shifted after almost half a century (1972–2019) of publication in the field’s premier journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Unlike previous attempts to understand the field’s scholarly evolution, we did not rely on expert opinion and analysis of themes but applied an automated content analytic method, more specifically structural topic modeling (STM). Using this method, we identified 37 key thematic topics that most optimally represent the 1,516 articles that were published in the studied period. After reporting these 37 thematic topics, we analyzed fluctuations based on three key periods of the journal and the editors’ disciplinary fields. While overall there was a trend of continuity (29 out of 37 topics) and little if any impact of the editors’ disciplines, a few thematic topics showed decline and fewer showed increase over time.