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Research topics and research communities are not disconnected from each other: communities and topics are interwoven and co-evolving. Yet, scientometric evaluations of topics and communities have been conducted independently and synchronically, with researchers often relying on homogeneous unit of analysis, such as authors, journals, institutions, or topics. Therefore, new methods are warranted that examine the dynamic relationship between topics and communities. This paper examines how research topics are mixed and matched in evolving research communities by using a hybrid approach which integrates both topic identification and community detection techniques. Using a data set on information retrieval (IR) publications, two layers of enriched information are constructed and contrasted: one is the communities detected through the topology of coauthorship network and the other is the topics of the …