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Subnetwork identification plays a significant role in analyzing, managing, and comprehending the structure and functions in big networks. Numerous approaches have been proposed to solve the problem of subnetwork identification as well as community detection. Most of the methods focus on detecting communities by considering node attributes, edge information, or both. This study focuses on discovering subnetworks containing researchers with similar or related areas of interest or research topics. A topic-aware subnetwork identification is essential to discover potential researchers on particular research topics and provide quality work. Thus, we propose a topic-based optimal subnetwork identification approach (TOSNet). Based on some fundamental characteristics, this paper addresses the following problems: 1)How to discover topic-based subnetworks with a vigorous collaboration intensity? 2) How to rank the discovered subnetworks and single out one optimal subnetwork? We evaluate the performance of the proposed method against baseline methods by adopting the modularity measure, assess the accuracy based on the size of the identified subnetworks, and check the scalability for different sizes of benchmark networks. The experimental findings indicate that our approach shows excellent performance in identifying contextual subnetworks that maintain intensive collaboration amongst researchers for a particular research topic.