We have relied on the abstracts of the scientific articles that have been published in the journal Le Travail humain since its first publication in 1933 in an attempt to grasp the evolution of the topics addressed. We analyzed these scientific publications in order to extract their essence in terms of research topics and to understand the scientific orientation of the journal and its evolution. First, we analysed the common features and the specificities of the publications in the different editions of the journal and the main differences between the consecutive editions. Then we were interested in the way the publications were organized around the extracted topics and we tried to visualize a semantic approximation. Finally, we were interested in the evolution of the topics from the creation of the journal to the 2016 edition.