<p>This study examined the thematic structure and temporal development of The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher (TAPER) from 2013 to 2025 using BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling approach. A corpus of 962 research article abstracts was analyzed to identify major topics, examine long-term trends, and compare topic distributions across the pre-COVID, during-COVID, and post-COVID periods. The analysis produced 13 interpretable topics. Five high-frequency topics accounted for 63.72% of the corpus, indicating that TAPER has been largely organized around broad and sustained domains, including affective-motivational functioning, educational leadership, L2 literacy development, digital education, and language-related literacies and assessment. Lower-proportion topics represented more specialized strands, such as relational support, STEM, multiculturalism, policy, teacher emotion regulation, feedback literacy, and psychosocial adaptation. Trend analyses showed statistically significant increasing trends only for Topic 1, Topic 11, and Topic 12. In addition, topic distributions differed significantly across the three pandemic-related periods, suggesting that COVID-19 was associated with a redistribution of thematic attention rather than a uniform shift across all topics. Overall, the findings indicate that TAPER exhibits a layered thematic structure composed of stable core domains and differentiated specialized strands. The study contributes to understanding the intellectual structure of a major Asia-Pacific education journal and offers practical implications for a range of stakeholders</p>