Data mining (DM) brings knowledge and theories from several fields including databases, machine learning, optimization, statistics, and data visualization and has been applied to various real-life applications. A large amount of data mining articles have been published. The goal of this study is to establish an overview of the past and current data mining research activities from the title and abstract more than 1400 textual documents collected from premier data mining journals and conference proceedings. Specifically, this study applied document clustering approaches to determine which subjects had been studied over the last several years, which subjects are currently popular, and describe the longitudinal changes of data mining publications