Abstract The number of published scientific articles is increasing dramatically and makes it difficult to keep track of research topics. This is particularly difficult in interdisciplinary research areas where different communities from different disciplines are working together. It would be useful to develop methods to automate the detection of research topics in a research domain. Here we propose a natural language processing (NLP) based method to automatically detect topics in defined corpora. We start by automatically generating a global state of the art of Living Machines conferences. Our NLP-based method classifies all published papers into different clusters corresponding to the research topic published in these conferences. We perform the same study on all papers published in the journals Bioinspiration & Biomimetics and Soft Robotics. In total this analysis concerns 2099 articles. Next, we analyze the intersection between the research themes published in the conferences and the corpora of these two journals. We also examine the evolution of the number of papers per research theme which determines the research trends. Together, these analyses provide a snapshot of the current state of the field, help to highlight open questions, and provide insights into the future.