Mapping research in assisted reproduction worldwide

Abstract

Research question: What are the current research trends in human assisted reproduction around the world?

Design: An analysis of 26,000+ scientific publications (articles, letters and reviews) produced worldwide between 2005 and 2016. The corpus of publications indexed in PubMed was obtained by combining the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms: 'Reproductive techniques', 'Reproductive medicine', 'Reproductive health', 'Fertility', 'Infertility' and 'Germ cells'. An analysis was then carried out using text mining algorithms to obtain the main topics of interest.

Results: A total of 44 main topics were identified, which were then further grouped into 11 categories: 'Laboratory techniques', 'Male factor', 'Quality of ART, ethics and law', 'Female factor', 'Public health and infectious diseases', 'Basic research and genetics', 'Pregnancy complications and risks', 'General - infertility & ART', 'Psychosocial aspects', 'Cancer' and 'Research methodology'. The USA was the leading country in terms of number of publications, followed by the UK, China and France. Research content in high-income countries is fairly homogeneous across categories and it is dominated by 'Laboratory techniques' in Western-Southern Europe, and by 'Quality of ART, ethics and law' in North America, Australia and New Zealand. 'Laboratory techniques' is also the most abundant category on a yearly basis.

Conclusions: This study identifies the current hot topics on human assisted reproduction worldwide and their temporal trends for 2005-2016. This provides an innovative picture of the current research that could help explore the areas where further research is needed.

Keywords: Assisted reproduction; IVF; Latent Dirichlet allocation; Temporal trends; Text mining; Topic modelling.