Astrobiology is often defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and in the Universe and thought of as a discipline. In practice though, the delineation of astrobiology-related research and corresponding groups of researchers is far from straightforward. Here, we propose to apply text-mining methods to identify researcher communities depending on thematic similarities in their published works. After fitting a latent Dirichlet allocation topic model to the complete article corpus of three flagship journals in the field – Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (1968–2020), Astrobiology (2001–2020), the International Journal of Astrobiology (2002–2020) – and computing author topic profiles, researcher communities are inferred from topic similarity networks to which community detection is applied. Such semantic social networks reveal, as we call them, ‘hidden communities of interest’ that gather researchers who publish on similar topics. The evolution of these communities is also mapped through time, bringing to light the significant shifts that the discipline underwent in the past 50 years.

The establishment of the possible presence of life on Mars (past or present) is based on the study of planetary analogues, which allow in situ analysis of the environments in which living organisms adapt to often extreme conditions. Although Mars has been a candidate for hosting life, based on observations made decades ago, it is thanks to the characteristics identified in environments, mainly volcanic, that it has been possible to calibrate instruments and detail the features of the red planet. In this paper, we present a review of the main characteristics of different planetary analogues, particularly deepening the study of Antarctica, to later expose the factors studied in Deception Island that have contributed to considering it as an analogue of Mars from different perspectives. Although geological and geomorphological studies on the analogies of the island already exist, detailed analyses that present the approach of astrobiological analogues are required, thus allowing further research.