From the early days of computer systems to the present, software testing has been considered as a crucial process that directly affects the quality and reliability of software-oriented products and services. Accordingly, there is a huge amount of literature regarding the improvement of software testing approaches. However, there are limited reviews that show the whole picture of the software testing studies covering the topics and trends of the field. This study aims to provide a general figure reflecting topics and trends of software testing by analyzing the majority of software testing articles published in the last 40 years. A semi-automated methodology is developed for the analysis of software testing corpus created from core publication sources. The methodology of the study is based on the implementation of probabilistic topic modeling approach to discover hidden semantic patterns in the 14,684 published articles addressing software testing issues between 1980 and 2019. The results revealed 42 topics of the field, highlighting five software development ages, namely specification, detection, generation, evaluation, and prediction. The recent accelerations of the topics also showed a trend toward prediction-based software testing actions. Additionally, a higher trend on the topics concerning “Security Vulnerability”, “Open Source” and “Mobile Application” was identified. This study showed that the current trend of software testing is towards prediction-based testing strategies. Therefore, the findings of this study may provide valuable insights for the industry and software communities to be prepared for the possible changes in the software testing procedures using prediction-based approaches.

Today’s dynamic distance learning environments offer a flexible, comfortable, and lifelong learning experience, independent of space and time. In this way, it also supports and develops existing traditional training programs. The increasing importance of knowledge, skills and learning in today’s technological life cycle has led to an increase and diversification of research and applications in distance learning. Accordingly, distance learning literature has a rich content supported by a multidisciplinary background. From this point of view, it is crucial to perceive the research landscape reflecting the general themes and trends studied in the field of distance learning. This study aims at revealing the distance learning research themes and trends by analyzing the 27,735 articles of journal conducted in the last decade. The methodology of the study is based on semantic content analysis implemented by N-gram-based text categorization technique. As a result, 10 main themes are discovered, namely, “System establishment”, “Media”, “Assessment”, “Method”, “Content”, “Education levels”, “Learner”, “Research methods”, “Interaction-Communication”, and “Resource-Material-Tool”. In this context, the findings of the study are expected to provide significant insights to guide prospective research and practice in the field and to develop continuous improvements and standards for distance education communities.

Bioinformatics, which has developed rapidly in recent years with the collaborative contributions of the fields of biology and informatics, provides a deeper perspective on the analysis and understanding of complex biological data. In this regard, bioinformatics has an interdisciplinary background and a rich literature in terms of domain-specific studies. Providing a holistic picture of bioinformatics research by analyzing the major topics and their trends and developmental stages is critical for an understanding of the field. From this perspective, this study aimed to analyze the last 50 years of bioinformatics studies (a total of 71,490 articles) by using an automated text-mining methodology based on probabilistic topic modeling to reveal the main topics, trends, and the evolution of the field. As a result, 24 major topics that reflect the focuses and trends of the field were identified. Based on the discovered topics and their temporal tendencies from 1970 until 2020, the developmental periods of the field were divided into seven phases, from the “newborn” to the “wisdom” stages. Moreover, the findings indicated a recent increase in the popularity of the topics “Statistical Estimation”, “Data Analysis Tools”, “Genomic Data”, “Gene Expression”, and “Prediction”. The results of the study revealed that, in bioinformatics studies, interest in innovative computing and data analysis methods based on artificial intelligence and machine learning has gradually increased, thereby marking a significant improvement in contemporary analysis tools and techniques based on prediction.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), capable of providing free (or low cost) courses for millions of learners anytime and anywhere, have gained the attention of researchers, educational institutions, and learners worldwide. Even though they provide several benefits, there are still some criticisms of MOOCs. For instance, MOOCs’ high dropout rates or predominantly elite participation are considered to be important problems. In order to develop solutions for these problems, a deeper understanding of MOOCs is required. Today, despite the availability of several research studies about MOOCs, there is a shortage of in-depth research on course characteristics, learner characteristics, and predictors of certification rates. This study examined MOOC and learner characteristics in detail and explored the predictors of course certification rates based on data from 122 Massachusetts Institute of Technology MOOCs (MITx) on edX platform as well as data about the 2.8 million participants registered in these MOOCs. The results indicated that as the number of courses offered and the number of learners enrolled increased in years, there was a decrease in the certification rates among enrolled learners. According to our results, the number of average chapters completed, total forum messages, and mean age predicted course certification rates positively. On the other hand, the total number of chapters in a course predicted the course certification rates negatively. Based on these results, shorter and more interactive MOOCs are recommended by considering the needs of the learners, course content design, and strategies encouraging the enrolled students to enter the courses.

The landscape of software engineering research has changed significantly from one year to the next in line with industrial needs and trends. Therefore, today’s research literature on software engineering has a rich and multidisciplinary content that includes a large number of studies; however, not many of them demonstrate a holistic view of the field. From this perspective, this study aimed to reveal a holistic view that reflects topics, trends, and trajectories in software engineering research by analyzing the majority of domain-specific articles published over the last 40 years. This study first presents an objective and systematic method for corpus creation through major publication sources in the field. A corpus was then created using this method, which includes 44 domain-specific conferences and journals and 57,174 articles published between 1980 and 2019. Next, this corpus was analyzed using an automated text-mining methodology based on a probabilistic topic-modeling approach. As a result of this analysis, 24 main topics were found. In addition, topical trends in the field were revealed. Finally, three main developmental stages of the field were identified as: the programming age, the software development age, and the software optimization age.