Mapping the evolution of a research field informs on its structure and its knowledge on which future research and innovations could be developed. Providing such analysis is essential to inform Science and Innovation policies, particularly for fields that need supports to be developed for the sustainability. Such a mapping can be achieved by combining bibliometric and text-mining approaches. Yet, no standardized method exists to conduct a large-scale analysis of a research field over decades, as opposed to classic reviews focusing on narrowly delineated topics. We defined a roadmap for mapping the research field of Food Science and Technology (FS&T) on pulses. This field is of particular interest, particularly in Europe, as pulse consumption needs to be developed for more sustainable and healthy diets. The scholarly output in this field keeps increasing, yet no study established a map of it to date. To initiate such a work, we queried the Web of Knowledge to delineate a corpus of 2,000 scholarly publications published between 1980 and 2018 on various pulse species and including at least one European author. Our approach combined the skills of experts in FS&T, scientometrics, and innovation economics. The clustering method used detected related research topics, revealing the structure of this field over time and the decelerating or front-run topics. Our analysis provides consistent information to Science and Innovation policies aimed at the development of pulses. Our developments also contribute to enrich the thesaurus for regenerating such science mapping on pulses, for new decades and/or by including a wider geographic area. Beyond this field, this methodological roadmap can be used for mapping any other research field.