A critical analysis of COVID-19 research literature: Text mining approach

• Published in: Intelligence-based medicine 2021, Vol.5, p.100036-100036, Article 100036
• Main Authors: Zengul, Ferhat D., Zengul, Ayse G., Mugavero, Michael J., Oner, Nurettin, Ozaydin, Bunyamin, Delen, Dursun, Willig, James H., Kennedy, Kierstin C., Cimino, James
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: COVID-19; Natural language processing; SARS COV-2; Text mining; Topic modeling
• ISSN: 2666-5212; 2666-5212
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ibmed.2021.100036

Among the stakeholders of COVID-19 research, clinicians particularly experience difficulty keeping up with the deluge of SARS-CoV-2 literature while performing their much needed clinical duties. By revealing major topics, this study proposes a text-mining approach as an alternative to navigating large volumes of COVID-19 literature. We obtained 85,268 references from the NIH COVID-19 Portfolio as of November 21. After the exclusion based on inadequate abstracts, 65,262 articles remained in the final corpus. We utilized natural language processing to curate and generate the term list. We applied topic modeling analyses and multiple correspondence analyses to reveal the major topics and the associations among topics, journal countries, and publication sources. In our text mining analyses of NIH's COVID-19 Portfolio, we discovered two sets of eleven major research topics by analyzing abstracts and titles of the articles separately. The eleven major areas of COVID-19 research based on abstracts included the following topics: 1) Public Health, 2) Patient Care & Outcomes, 3) Epidemiologic Modeling, 4) Diagnosis and Complications, 5) Mechanism of Disease, 6) Health System Response, 7) Pandemic Control, 8) Protection/Prevention, 9) Mental/Behavioral Health, 10) Detection/Testing, 11) Treatment Options. Further analyses revealed that five (2,3,4,5, and 9) of the eleven abstract-based topics showed a significant correlation (ranked from moderate to weak) with title-based topics. By offering up the more dynamic, scalable, and responsive categorization of published literature, our study provides valuable insights to the stakeholders of COVID-19 research, particularly clinicians. [Display omitted] •Reveals eleven major topics using 65 thousand abstracts and titles from the NIH COVID-19 portfolio.•Maps the relationships between abstract-based topics and title-based topics, publication types, sources, and countries.•Confirms the scientific race in disseminating viable study findings, especially for specific topics such as detection/testing.•Highlights the time advantage of specific topics (e.g., health system response) over other topics (e.g., epidemiologic modeling).