A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature

Sara Urru; Veronica Sciannameo; Corrado Lanera; Silvano Salaris; Dario Gregori; Paola Berchialla

doi:10.1177/20552076221133696

A topic trend analysis on COVID-19 literature

Digit Health. 2022 Oct 27:8:20552076221133696. doi: 10.1177/20552076221133696. eCollection 2022 Jan-Dec.

Authors

Sara Urru¹, Veronica Sciannameo², Corrado Lanera¹, Silvano Salaris¹, Dario Gregori¹, Paola Berchialla²

Affiliations

¹ Unit of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
² Center of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences, University of Torino, Turin, Italy.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; information retrieval; open science; research practice; science communications; text mining.