What is forensic chemistry research in Brazil made of? A descriptive and topic modeling analysis of CAPES theses and dissertations

This article investigates the landscape of forensic chemistry research in Brazil by analyzing 118 master's and doctoral theses and dissertations retrieved from the CAPES Thesis and Dissertation Catalog using the keyword “química forense”. Through text mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, we identified thematic patterns and institutional trends in graduate-level research. Descriptive statistics revealed a concentration of academic production in southeastern Brazil and a predominance of master’s theses. The topic modeling analysis, applied to both unigrams and n-grams, uncovered research clusters focused on analytical instrumentation, electrochemical methods, drug detection, post-blast residue analysis, chemometric tools, and forensic education. Notably, topics such as synthetic drugs and pedagogical applications emerged as distinct and underexplored areas. The results offer a structured overview of the academic development of forensic chemistry in Brazil and highlight the utility of topic modeling as a tool for meta-research and policy planning in science education.