A Field in Movement: A Bibliometric Analysis of Migration Research in Seven Demographic Journals Using Large Language Models

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of migration research within seven prominent English and French demographic journals, utilizing Large Language Models and BERT-based topic modeling. By leveraging these text processing techniques, we systematically classify research papers by migration type (internal vs. international) and explore key thematic and geographic trends in migration studies. Our results show variations in the importance of international and internal migration research over time, but with a marked dominance of international migration studies in more recent years. We further uncover the geographical bias in migration research, noting a stronger emphasis on high-income countries as the main destinations studied. Overall, we also note considerable shifts in topics over time for both types of migration. The integration of LLMs allowed for a more nuanced, quantitative insights into the evolving landscape of migration research across time and space, proving to be a valuable tool for multilingual bibliometric analysis.