Supplementary data and code for: Beyond the word 'meiofauna': retrieval blind spots and shifting taxonomic output in five decades of Korean meiofauna research (1971–2026)

Data, documentation and code supporting a bibliometric and topic-modelling study of research on free-living benthic meiofauna produced with Korean institutional authorship, degrees or funding, 1971–2026. The corpus contains 1,003 papers (874 journal articles and 129 theses) with bibliographic, screening, source and topic fields. The records were assembled from Korean and international databases (OpenAlex, Crossref, RISS, KCI, ScienceON, KoreaScience, Google Scholar), taxon, author, affiliation and venue sweeps, citation tracking and researchers' publication lists. Every retrieval route is recorded per record. The release includes: the eligibility rules and their dated amendment log; the search-term matrix and controlled vocabulary; topic assignments under 30 random seeds; the OpenAlex snapshot (reference lists, author records and citation counts, retrieved 26 September 2026) used for the network and citation analyses, and the author-identifier merge table; Supporting Tables S1–S16; code that reproduces the change-point models, topic stability, citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-authorship network and all figures directly from the released files, together with the BERTopic pipeline as run. Abstract text is not redistributed; it can be retrieved through the DOIs and OpenAlex identifiers provided. Funding: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2026-25482094).