Where has hydrogeologic science been, and where is it going? Research trends in hydrogeology publishing over the past 60 years

Quantifying historical research trends in the field of hydrogeology is not only generally informative for hydrogeologists but is essential for fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and assessing the relationship between academic study and societal interests in hydrogeologic issues. To address this, a topic model was applied to over 37,000 academic abstracts published in over 20 journals between 1963–2022 in the field of hydrogeology to study the evolution of topic trends through time. Model results were fed into the popular large-language model ChatGPT to assign topic names, representing an unsupervised method. The results indicate that, historically, popular topics related to methodological development and analytical and numerical models analytical and numerical methods in groundwater flow modeling and well hydraulics have given way to topics related to more increasingly complex models (groundwater monitoring and uncertainty estimation and groundwater modeling calibration and simulation) as data and computational capability becomes increasingly available. An insight into the period of boom-and-bust in contaminant hydrogeology is reflected by a shift in focus from topics related to assessment and characterization of contaminant sources toward topics related to degradation and remediation methods. Topics of emerging prevalence (sustainable groundwater resource management, catchment hydrology and runoff processes) in the current period reflect an increasing focus on treating the surface-water/groundwater system as a single system. In addition, results suggest that topic distribution within the field of hydrogeology has become more varied as time has progressed.