A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature
Objective In the past 2 years, the number of scientific publications has grown exponentially. The COVID-19 outbreak hugely contributed to this dramatic increase in the volume of published research. Currently, text mining of the volume of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 publications is limited to the first m...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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SAGE Publishing
2022-10-01
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| Series: | Digital Health |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221133696 |
| _version_ | 1828317675091132416 |
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| author | Sara Urru Veronica Sciannameo Corrado Lanera Silvano Salaris Dario Gregori Paola Berchialla |
| author_facet | Sara Urru Veronica Sciannameo Corrado Lanera Silvano Salaris Dario Gregori Paola Berchialla |
| author_sort | Sara Urru |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Objective In the past 2 years, the number of scientific publications has grown exponentially. The COVID-19 outbreak hugely contributed to this dramatic increase in the volume of published research. Currently, text mining of the volume of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 publications is limited to the first months of the outbreak. We aim to identify the major topics in COVID-19 literature collected from several citational sources and analyze the temporal trend from November 2019 to December 2021. Methods We performed an extensive literature search on SARS-Cov-2 and COVID-19 publications on PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) and a structural topic modelling on the retrieved abstracts. The temporal trend of the recognized topics was analyzed. Furthermore, a comparison between our corpus and the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) repository was performed. Results We collected 269,186 publications and identified 10 topics. The most popular topic was related to the clinical pictures of the COVID-19 outbreak, which has a constant trend, and the least popular includes studies on COVID-19 literature and databases. “Telemedicine”, “Vaccine development”, and “Epidemiology” were popular topics in the early phase of the pandemic; increasing topics in the last period are “COVID-19 impact on mental health”, “Forecasting”, and “Molecular Biology”. “Education” was the second most popular topic, which emerged in September 2020. Conclusions We identified 10 topics for classifying COVID-19 research publications and estimated a nonlinear temporal trend that gives an overview of their unfolding over time. Several citational databases must be searched to retrieve a complete set of studies despite the efforts to build repositories for COVID-19 literature. Our collected data can help build a more focused literature search between November 2019 and December 2021 when carrying out systematic and rapid reviews and our findings can give a complete picture on the topic. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-13T17:31:44Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-bcf73b20619c4d0baebfe3ed32abeedf |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2055-2076 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-13T17:31:44Z |
| publishDate | 2022-10-01 |
| publisher | SAGE Publishing |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Digital Health |
| spelling | doaj.art-bcf73b20619c4d0baebfe3ed32abeedf2022-12-22T02:37:33ZengSAGE PublishingDigital Health2055-20762022-10-01810.1177/20552076221133696A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literatureSara Urru0Veronica Sciannameo1Corrado Lanera2Silvano Salaris3Dario Gregori4Paola Berchialla5 Unit of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, , Padua, Italy Center of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences, , Turin, Italy Unit of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, , Padua, Italy Unit of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, , Padua, Italy Unit of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, , Padua, Italy Center of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences, , Turin, ItalyObjective In the past 2 years, the number of scientific publications has grown exponentially. The COVID-19 outbreak hugely contributed to this dramatic increase in the volume of published research. Currently, text mining of the volume of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 publications is limited to the first months of the outbreak. We aim to identify the major topics in COVID-19 literature collected from several citational sources and analyze the temporal trend from November 2019 to December 2021. Methods We performed an extensive literature search on SARS-Cov-2 and COVID-19 publications on PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) and a structural topic modelling on the retrieved abstracts. The temporal trend of the recognized topics was analyzed. Furthermore, a comparison between our corpus and the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) repository was performed. Results We collected 269,186 publications and identified 10 topics. The most popular topic was related to the clinical pictures of the COVID-19 outbreak, which has a constant trend, and the least popular includes studies on COVID-19 literature and databases. “Telemedicine”, “Vaccine development”, and “Epidemiology” were popular topics in the early phase of the pandemic; increasing topics in the last period are “COVID-19 impact on mental health”, “Forecasting”, and “Molecular Biology”. “Education” was the second most popular topic, which emerged in September 2020. Conclusions We identified 10 topics for classifying COVID-19 research publications and estimated a nonlinear temporal trend that gives an overview of their unfolding over time. Several citational databases must be searched to retrieve a complete set of studies despite the efforts to build repositories for COVID-19 literature. Our collected data can help build a more focused literature search between November 2019 and December 2021 when carrying out systematic and rapid reviews and our findings can give a complete picture on the topic.https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221133696 |
| spellingShingle | Sara Urru Veronica Sciannameo Corrado Lanera Silvano Salaris Dario Gregori Paola Berchialla A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature Digital Health |
| title | A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature |
| title_full | A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature |
| title_fullStr | A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature |
| title_full_unstemmed | A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature |
| title_short | A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature |
| title_sort | topic trend analysis on covid 19 literature |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221133696 |
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