EPB: Collaborations and Topics Over Decade

When Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics (EPB) turned 50 we wrote a short commentary about how the topics in the journal have evolved over the years. In the latest issue of the journal we (Na Jiang, Joana Barros, Seraphim Alvanides, Jinlin Wu and myself) revisited this, while at the same time explored how collaborations and topics have been evolving along with how this links to the new Editorial Advisory Board which has recently been selected to reflect the journal’s thematic areas of focus and the breadth of expertise needed to guide it into the future. 

If you wish to find out more, we encourage you to read the commentary (a link is provided at the bottom of this post). However, to give a sense of some of the things we explore, below we show some of the images relating to the commentary ranging from our workflow to some of our results from the analysis of authors, paper titles and abstracts, and how through topic modeling and community detection we can explore how the collaboration networks and topics have changed over time. 

The workflow.

 

Visualization of the EPB author network.

Evolution of the largest 10 communities by decade: (a) The Number of Active Members; (b) The Number of Papers Published; (c) Michael Batty’s Collaboration Network.

Topics evolution overtime.

Full reference: 

Crooks, A.T., Jiang, N., Barros, J., Alvanides, S., & Wu, J. (2026). Environment and Planning B: Collaborations and Topics Over Decades, Environment and Planning B, 53(6), 1189-1199. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083261474805. (pdf)