Social work has expanded substantially over the past four decades, with rising publication output, increasing international participation, and consolidation of core publication venues. It remains unclear, however, whether this expansion reflects paradigmatic transformation or adaptive change within a stable intellectual core. This study examines long-term continuity and change in social work scholarship by integrating bibliometric analysis with structural topic modeling (STM). A journal-based sampling frame was constructed from disciplinary social work journals identified by Perron et al.. Records retrieved from Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus were deduplicated and screened, yielding a bibliometric corpus of 41,713 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1979 and 2025. STM was applied at two levels: an abstract-level model (K = 20) across the full corpus and a full-text model (K = 25) on a subset of 557 eligible full-text articles. Results indicate sustained growth alongside persistent institutional concentration and balanced thematic distributions. Structural breaks are limited in scope and duration, suggesting that social work scholarship has evolved primarily through adaptive reconfiguration rather than paradigmatic rupture.