A tool derived for the technological watch (\htmladdnormallinkfoot{Tetralogie}{http://atlas.irit.fr}) is applied to a dataset of three consecutive years of article abstracts published in the European Journal {\it Astronomy and Astrophysics}. This tool is based on a two step approach: first, a pretreatment step that extracts elementary items from the raw information (keywords, authors, year of publication, etc.); second, a mining step that analyses the extracted information using statistical methods. It is shown that this approach allows one to qualify and visualize some major trends characterizing the current astronomical literature: multi-author collaborative work, the impact of observational projects and thematic maps of publishing authors.