Topic identification is an area of data mining that finds common text/ themes from several documents. It is a data summarization technique that helps to summarize documents. This area is of great interest among researchers as its applications in the real world are very wide. This paper presents a review of topic identification techniques. Existing solutions include text clustering, latent semantic approach, probabilistic latent semantics approach, latent Dirichlet allocation approach, association rule-based approaches, document clustering, and soft computing approach. Soft computing techniques including fuzzy logic, neural networks, support vector machine, ant colony optimization, swarm optimization, and their hybrid approaches provide a good solution for text clustering. This paper presents a comparative study of different text mining techniques with their strengths and weaknesses. A future dimension is also proposed to develop a hybrid approach for topic identification using different techniques.