Research on Postgraduate Students’ Research Competence in Chinese Journals: An LDA Analysis of Thematic Evolution and Shifting Research Foci

Abstract

This study examines the thematic structure and development of research on postgraduate students’ research competence in Chinese journal literature. A corpus of 212 articles published between 2005 and 2025 in Chinese Core Journals and CSSCI-indexed journals and retrieved from CNKI was analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. Five major topics were identified: the development of doctoral students’ research competence, research innovation competence and its supporting mechanisms, supervisory and instructional support, problems and approaches in research competence development, and research competence development in disciplinary and practice-based contexts. Analysis of topic probabilities showed that research on doctoral students’ research competence became more prominent in the later years, while research on research innovation competence remained prominent across the three study periods. In contrast, supervisory and instructional support and general problems in research competence development became relatively less prominent, whereas research situated in disciplinary and practice-based contexts remained comparatively stable. Overall, research attention broadened beyond general approaches to developing research competence. The literature increasingly considered the conditions associated with competence development and distinguished among research populations and training contexts.