Whose P alestine Is It? A Topic Modelling Approach to National Framing in Academic Research (2025)

Abstract: In this study, we investigate how author affiliation shapes academic discourse, proposing it as an effective proxy for author perspective in understanding what topics are studied, how nations are framed, and whose realities are prioritised. Using Palestine as a case study, we apply BERTopic and Structural Topic Modelling (STM) to 29,536 English-language academic articles collected from the OpenAlex database. We find that domestic authors focus on practical, local issues like healthcare, education, and the environment, while foreign authors emphasise legal, historical, and geopolitical discussions. These differences, in our interpretation, reflect lived proximity to war and crisis. We also note that while BERTopic captures greater lexical nuance, STM enables covariate-aware comparisons, offering deeper insight into how affiliation correlates with thematic emphasis. We propose extending this framework to other underrepresented countries, including a future study focused on Gaza post-October 7.

## introduction in academia, countries are studied not only by their own scholars but also by scholars from other countries. yet, the institutional location of a researcher may shape how a nation is studied -what issues are highlighted, what is left unsaid. in this study, we ask: do researchers in different countries emphasise different topics when studying the same country? this question is crucial because academic research plays a great role in shaping global narratives, and overlooking how author perspectives shape national discourse -in addition to traditionally-studied aspects such as race, class and gender -may lead to incomplete or skewed understandings of the nation being studied. we explore this question using palestine as a case study, owing to its history as one of the most politicallycharged and contested nations @xcite . with a long history of occupation, resistance, and conflict, palestine stands as not only a subject of study but a site of deep symbolism, particularly for scholars with direct ties to the nation. we argue that author affiliation, domestic vs foreign, serves as an effective proxy for author perspective, shaping academic attention just as significantly as other social factors like race, gender, and class. through understanding these influences, we can better assess knowledge construction, especially for marginalised and geopoliticallyoppressed nations such as palestine. to this end, we compare two different legacy topic modelling frameworks -namely bertopic @xcite , and structured topic modelling (stm) @xcite -to a corpus of over 29,000 english-language academic articles on palestine, and ask whether -and howauthors from palestinian and non-palestinian institutions differ in their topical focus when studying the country. our findings reveal that domestic scholars tend to focus on applied, survival-oriented themes like resistance, public health, education and infrastructure, whereas foreign scholars emphasise more abstract, geopolitical topics like conflict, war and law. not only do these patterns reflect different proximities to the crises, but they also raise important questions about whose voices get to define which aspects of national narratives. in obtaining these findings, we note that bertopic captures a higher detail of nuance in the text, while stm allows for covariate-level comparisons and thus provides a deeper look into how affiliation compares with topic. ## related work previous literature in the fields of science of science and computational social science have examined how researcher identity influences topic selection. gender, in particular, is a strong reason -an example is how fewer women study nstem (natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics) due to their systematic exclusion from the field @xcite . other studies have shown that women are more likely to pursue gender-related fields such as families, gender-based violence and lgbtqia+ studies than men are, due to their direct connection to the topics at hand @xcite . similarly, african american/black scholars tend to study topics pertinent to their own communities, such as socioeconomic studies, health care and disparity, more than other topics @xcite . this tendency towards certain topics by certain groups, ostensibly self-serving, is an integral part of addressing issues in equity, as remarked by scholars like @xcite . diversity in scholarship is not merely ethical; it affects what questions are asked, how they are framed, and which narratives are centered -and by whom. while previous works shed light on diversity manifested in forms such as gender and race, much less work looks into how geographical affiliation affects the academic representation of a country -a question particularly relevant for countries like palestine, where scholars are simultaneously knowledge producers and subjects of crisis. in such contexts, studying how author affiliation influences topical emphasis reveals whose realities are being prioritised in academic discourse. our work builds on this line of inquiry by empirically comparing the research topics of domestic and international scholars writing about palestine, showing how geographical distance shapes academic narratives. ## results bertopic. the 15 topics generated by bertopic are given in figure 1 for articles by domestic authors, and in figure 2 for foreign authors. the top keywords for each topic, by the class-based tf-idf score (c-tf-idf), can be found in appendix c. quantitatively comparing the two groups, we calculate the jensen-shannon divergence of the foreign affiliation articles from the domestic ones to be 0.319, indicating a moderate divergence (which may in part be attributed to the two low-information or "garbage" topics 0 and 6 in figure 2 ); the topics of discussion are not identical but not totally disjoint. in order to investigate this further, we look at the topics and their keywords in detail. for both domestic and foreign bertopic outputs, we collect the top 10 keywords per topic, and create a list of 244 unique words. for each of these 244 unique words, we compute two scores: domestic score, and foreign score. these are each the sums of the c-tf-idf scores as given by the bertopic model for the foreign and domestic models respectively, with a score of zero if the word did not appear. for instance, if woman has a score of 0.1 in domestic topic 1, 0.2 in domestic topic 3, 0.5 in foreign topic 4 and 0.1 in foreign topic 9, then it has a domestic score of 0.3 and a foreign score of 0.6. however, if a word only appears in the domestic model, its foreign score would be zero. using these two scores, we calculate a simple bias metric -by subtracting the foreign score from the domestic score -to classify the words as domestic-or foreign-biased. as such, foreignbiased words have positive scores, whilst domesticbiased words have negative scores. figure 3 details the results (excluding the garbage topics) of the top 45 keywords by cumulative (foreign plus domestic) c-tf-idf score. the dotted grey line is where domestic bias equals foreign bias, i.e., the domestic and foreign word scores are the same. the overlap between the two groups is small - education (topic 0 in figure 1 and topic 1 in figure 2 ), law (topic 4 in both) and urban studies (topic 8 in both) -with these three topics appearing to be studied significantly by both foreign and domestic authors. according to figure 3 , a word-level analysis reveals that terms like legal, rights, and resistance are slightly more prominent in domestic works, whereas words like education, court and urban are used a little more frequently by foreign authors, despite being prominent in topics discussed by both author groups. words like teachers, court and symptoms, however, lie very close to the line, signalling their equal importance to foreign and domestic scholars. figures 1 and 2 further reveal that, on both topicand word-levels, domestic-biased studies pertain to a diverse collection of 'local' topics, such as energy and water, medicine and health, construction and finance, directly relevant to palestinian society, largely bypassing politics and war. this suggests a more granular, applied focus on daily survival, resistance, and local infrastructure. in contrast, while foreign authors also study palestine in multiple contexts -such as history, poetry, and politics -most foreign-authored topics tends to frame the country within geopolitical narratives, addressing topics such as diplomacy, occupation, refugees, trauma, and international law. this reinforces our idea of author positionality's impact on topical emphasis; for domestic scholars, the ongoing humanitarian crises may push their research toward practical, community-rooted needs. meanwhile, foreign scholars -while perhaps motivated by advocacy -may be more inclined to frame palestine as a site of conflict and resistance, engaging international audiences. in other words, for domestic scholars, the crises and war are not an abstract subject to be studied, but a daily reality to be endured. however, despite capturing nuanced topics across the two groups, we find bertopic to have several limitation. it often includes repetitive or redundant topic words (such as topic 10, which contains both darwish and darwishs), lacks details on topic prevalence and does not support covariate analysis. to address these, we turn to stm, allowing us to formally model the relationship between author affiliation and topic prevalence. stm. the topic prevalence of the 15 topics generated by stm, with the top keywords per topic, along with the detailed topic words, are visualised in appendix e. based on the top 20 keywords, we used human evaluation on the results of four llms to label the topics, which are detailed in in terms of general prevalence, israeli-palestinian war is, intuitively, most frequently discussed by both groups. upon examination of the keywords, it appears that topics 4 and 7 -namely name formatting systems and academic publishing locations -may be garbage topics (as seen in bertopic's results as well), containing boilerplate academic terms rather than thematic content. removing the two, we proceed to estimate the effect of the affiliation group on topic prevalence -our main result for this paper -as shown in figure 4 , with positive values indicating stronger association with domestic authors, and negative values with international ones. in line with our observations from bertopic, we find that domestic authors are more likely to study topics related to palestine's internal contexts, such as environmental studies, healthcare, trauma response. it is worth noting here that while bertopic's word-level analysis classified the keyword education as foreign-biased, stm reveals education to be a strongly domestic topic -highlighting the distinction between word-and topic-level analyses. the domestically-prevalent topics appear to reflect concerns pertaining to public health, environment, and social welfare, rooted in local realities as a result of the ongoing humanitarian crises since as far back in history as the 1948 nakba -the expulsion and forced displacement of over 700,000 palestinians from their homes by zionist militant groups that later formed today's israel defense forces (idf) (natour, 2016) -marking the beginning of the resistance that goes on to this very day. in contrast to their domestic counterparts, we see that foreign authors are more likely to engage with externally-oriented themes like feminist critique, legal affairs, archaeology, but most prominently, the ongoing war and ensuing politics. this divergence may be a product of the differential proximity to crisis; for domestic scholars, the war is an existential condition, so their response seems to be survival-oriented scholarship. resource limitations and institutional pressures may be additional factors pushing them to prioritise healthcare, leaving discussions such as those of prominent poets like mahmoud darwish to foreign (or perhaps internationally-established palestinian) authors. for these foreign authors, palestine is a symbolic site -used as a lens for broader theoretical, legal, or comparative debates. some may be motivated by solidarity -such as umar and ur rahman's work (2025) -using academic work to expose the injustice and inhumane activities carried out against the gazans, or shed light on objects of protest like port (2024) does. based on our comparison of the two topic modelling approaches for this task, we note that while stm offers statistical modelling the effect of author affiliation and identifies broader topic prevalence, it tends to yield coarser-grained themes. compared to bertopic, it captures fewer nuanced or culturally specific topic keywords -such as negotiations or refugees -that emerge clearly in bertopic outputs, instead yielding more low-information topics. however, stm's strength lies in its ability to support covariate-informed analysis, offering a detailed look into the structural relationships across topics. ## conclusion in this study, we asked whether the institutional affiliation of researchers affects how a country is represented in academic work, using palestine as a case study. by applying two topic modelling frameworks -bertopic and stm -to a corpus of over 29,000 articles, we found consistent evidence that domestic and international scholars frame palestine differently, likely as a result of lived proximity to crises; domestic authors centre on internal realities, such as public health, education, and environmental issues, that reflect immediate societal needs as a result of the ongoing crises, wars and recent genocide. in contrast, foreign scholars adopt theoretical and external-facing framings with legal, historical and geopolitical conflict-related topics. in our comparison of the two topic modelling frameworks, we note that bertopic allows for richer lexical, word-level nuance, whereas stm supports structured comparisons and statistical inference. together, our findings suggest that author affiliation is not merely a background detail; it is a factor that shapes the thematic landscape of national academic discourse. our framework -combining bibliometric filtering, topic modelling and affiliation-based comparison -is easily adaptable to other countries. applying it to other underrepresented or geopolitically-oppressed regions -including a further study on gaza pre-and post-october 7, 2023 -could further highlight how knowledge production is shaped by researcher's positionality.