[Purpose/significance] The editorial board of academic journals is usually composed of scholars with high reputation and achievements, who not only gatekeep the publication content and publication quality, but also have great control on the purpose, policy and development direction of academic journals.This paper aims to reveal the influence of changes in the editorial board of academic journals on their publication characteristics.[Method/process] This pa? perselected two top international journals (i.e., Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and In? formation Processing & Management) in the library and information science (LIS) field as cases and focused on the per? spective of changes in topic evolution and impact factor.On the one hand, the study employed the LDA model to extract topics from the titles and abstracts of journal articles before and after the adjustment of the editorial board. In addition, the information model was adopted as a framework to help illustrate the diversity of topics and analyze the impact of changes in the editorial board of two academic journals on the topic evolution. On the other hand,the study targeted on the impact factors of journals in the last five years and compared the changing trend before and after the adjustment of the editorial board. [Result/conclusion] The research findings confirm that there is a significant synchronous effect be? tween the adjustment of the editorial board and the development of international academic journals. Besides, the paper also presents the current status and breakthrough in the topic selection and direction of the top international journals in the LIS field in recent years.