The files include: (1) The detailed attributes of 346 volunteered geographic information (VGI)-related articles published in 24 international refereed journals in GIScience between 20 November 2007 and 20 November 2017. (2) The Python codes for performing the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, which can be used to classify the articles into a given number of topics based on their abstracts. The data and codes support the findings of our article entitled ‘Volunteered geographic information research in the first decade: a narrative review of selected journal articles in GIScience’.