The dynamic development of production engineering, driven by digitalization, sustainability requirements, and the evolution toward Industry 5.0, generates a new set of strategic challenges for research and practice. This study conducts a thematic analysis of scientific papers presented at production-related conferences indexed in the Scopus database between 2024 and 2025. The objective is to evaluate the extent to which contemporary research addresses key challenges in production engineering, including digital transformation, sustainable manufacturing, resilient production systems, human-centric automation, and data-driven operational excellence. The selection of Scopus-indexed conferences ensures a consistent quality threshold for the analysed contributions. A hybrid methodology combining manual analysis and text mining techniques was applied to map the thematic distribution of the papers against a predefined framework of challenges. The results reveal dominant areas of research focus, identify critical thematic gaps, and provide insights into the current alignment of scientific inquiry with strategic needs in production engineering. Based on the findings, recommendations are formulated to guide future research directions and enhance the thematic coverage of production engineering conferences.