Iranian COVID-19 Publications in LitCovid: Text Mining and Topic Modeling

Meisam Dastani,Shah Nazir,Farshid Danesh

doi:10.1155/2021/3315695

Abstract

COVID-19 is a threat to the lives of people all over the world. As a result of the new and unknown nature of COVID-19, much research has been conducted recently. In order to increase and enhance the growth rate of Iranian publications on COVID-19, this article aims to analyze these publications in LitCovid to identify the topical and content structure and topic modeling of scientific publications in the mentioned subject area. The present article is applied research performed by using an analytical approach as well as text mining techniques. The statistical population is all the publications of Iranian researchers in LitCovid. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Python were used to analyze the data and implement text mining and topic modeling algorithms. Data analysis shows that the percentage of Iranian publications in the eight topical groups in LitCovid is as follows: prevention (39.57%), treatment (18.99%), diagnosis (18.99%), forecasting (7.83%), case report (6.52%), mechanism (3.91%), transmission (3.62%), and general (0.58%). The results indicate that patient, pandemic, outbreak, case, Iranian, model, care, health, coronavirus, and disease are the most important words in the publications of Iranian researchers in LitCovid. Six topics for prevention; four topics for treatment and case report and forecasting; three topics for diagnosis, mechanism, and transmission in general have been obtained by implementing the topic modeling algorithm. Most of the Iranian publications in LitCovid are related to the topic “pandemic status,” with 22.47% in the prevention category, and the lowest number of publications is related to the topic “environment,” with 11.11% in the transmission category. The present study indicates a better understanding of essential and strategic issues of Iranian publications in LitCovid. The results reveal that many Iranian studies on COVID-19 were primarily on the issues related to prevention, management, and control. These findings provided a structured and research-based viewpoint of COVID-19 in Iran to guide researchers and policymakers.

Highlights

In December 2019, an epidemic with mild respiratory infections was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, China’s largest metropolitan area in the Hubei Province
Since it was impossible to identify the causative agent, people who suffered from this disease were classified as “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” e CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) in China organized an extensive research program to study the extent and prevalence of the disease. e etiology of this disease is currently attributed to a new virus named SARS-CoV-2, belonging to the coronavirus family and causing COVID-19 [1]. e Director-General of the WHO, “Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,” on February 11, 2020, announced that the disease is caused by this new coronavirus and named it “COVID-19.”
It was evident that the highest percentage of global and Iranian publications on COVID-19 was in the category of “Prevention”; 39.57% and 32.86% of the publications of Iranian and global researchers in LitCovid, respectively, were in the category of prevention

Summary

Introduction

In December 2019, an epidemic with mild respiratory infections was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, China’s largest metropolitan area in the Hubei Province. Since it was impossible to identify the causative agent, people who suffered from this disease were classified as “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” e CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) in China organized an extensive research program to study the extent and prevalence of the disease. E etiology of this disease is currently attributed to a new virus named SARS-CoV-2, belonging to the coronavirus family and causing COVID-19 [1]. At the International Health Regulations (IHR) meeting on January 30, 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 was identified as a global health threat, since by that time, it was reported that it had spread to 18 countries by human-to-human contact [2]. Because of the increase in the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO stated on January 30, 2020, that the new coronavirus is the sixth most common public health emergency worldwide, threatening China and all countries [2]. According to the website of Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html), by August 16, 2021, the total COVID-19 cases in Iran were 4467015 (ranked 11th in the world) and total deaths were 98483 (ranked 13th in the world)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion