The Society of Social Studies of Science (4S) is well known as the largest academic group of studies of Science Technology and Society (STS) in the world. Its annual academic conferences, the 4S meetings, have attracted many university scholars, institute researchers, business people, and government policy makers to communicate global hot topics and trends in the field of STS. Therefore, the research focuses of STS are considered to be reflected in the annual meetings of 4S. Based on the literature review of the STS and the 4S meeting studies in China, this paper discusses the theme changes of the 4S meetings. From the reports and experiences of the 4S meeting attendees from the National Academy of Innovation Strategy (NAIS), an affiliation institution of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), this paper makes a comprehensive review of the 2016-2020 4S annual meetings. Two data sources are highly valued in this study, the attendees' reports, and the programme and schedule documents of the 4S meetings with hundreds of speech abstracts presented in the panels of the 4S meetings. The themes, the panel topics and the speech abstracts in the last 5 years' programme lists are discussed by using Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA), which is a mixed method used to conduct cross analyses of the text contents efficiently. The conclusions about the STS focuses and trends are summarized as follows:the data-based researches on knowledge, innovation, and public policy could be the main directions of the current STS research, as shown in the high frequency word statistical analysis; the public policies and the historical references for specific issues in applied science, technology and engineering fields, as a trend of the STS development, in the subject occurrence chart. The paper also verifies the STS trends of the global development and the topic diffusion, and provides some constructive ideas about the STS studies in China and the participation suggestion of the 4S meetings in the discussion part, which could be a reference for experts in the STS.

science, technology, and society (STS)  /  The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)  /  The European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)  /  qualitative data analysis (QDA)