Cyber aggression and abuse (CAA) has become a major interdisciplinary research area spanning psychology, communication, public health, and computer science. Existing reviews have largely focused on detection methods and model performance, offering limited insight into how CAA research themes have evolved over time at the field level. This study addresses this gap by, to the best of our knowledge, applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to 2309 Web of Science–indexed publications with English-language abstracts published between 2000 and 2024, providing a large-scale, longitudinal, and multi-level analysis of the literature. The model identifies 29 latent topics, which are organized using the User–Activity–Content (UAC) framework to link psychosocial research, platform-mediated behaviors, and computational detection approaches. Temporal analysis reveals a clear methodological transition: early dominance of survey-based and psychosocial themes gradually declines in relative prominence, while computational topics related to machine learning, deep learning, and pre-trained language models exhibit sustained growth, particularly after 2010. A Hot–Cold topic classification further distinguishes emerging, stable, and declining research directions. Journal-level, disciplinary, and geographic analyses reveal systematic differentiation across venues and regions, with complementary emphases on psychosocial and computational approaches. These findings provide a structured, field-level perspective on the evolution of CAA research and offer practical value for researchers, funding agencies, journal editors, and publishers by identifying dominant, emerging, and declining themes that can inform research prioritization, editorial planning, and strategic investment.
Yengejeh et al. (Tue,) studied this question.