P775 Evolution of inflammatory bowel disease research from a bird’s eye perspective: A text-mining analysis of publication trends and topics

Abstract

Abstract Background There is an extensive and growing research effort in the field of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), with varying topics over the years. A comprehensive analysis of the trends in research and publications in IBD may help us grasp the gaps in knowledge and map out potential future areas of interest. Text-mining is the extraction of information from free text using computational methods. It can be applied to identify trends in a research field. The aim of our study was to create a map of IBD research of the last 25 years using text-mining techniques Methods We retrieved all available MEDLINE/PubMed annual datasets from 1992 to the end of 2017. We selected a set of relevant keywords from MeSH to include all papers relating to inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative colitis. For each article we extracted the following data: article ID, title, journal, date of publication, abstract text, article type, keywords, citation frequency, and first author name and affiliation (from which we extracted the country of origin). We categorised the articles screening topics by using word combination and title match technique. We also scanned the topics in list of 100 papers (grouped by 5-year periods starting with 1992–1997) with the highest citation factor, i.e., the articles with the most citations from publish up to 2018. Results Between the years 1992 and 2017, 20,014 IBD-related publications appeared on PubMed. The annual number of publications increased almost 4-fold (from 354 in 1992 to 1361 in 2017). The USA had the highest number of papers (n = 3427/20,014, 17%) while Denmark and Israel had the highest rate of publications per population (for 2012–2017, 12 publications per 1 million in Israel and 17 in Denmark). The countries that achieved the most significant growth in publication rates were China, Egypt, Romania with growth rates of 0.0069, 0.0068 and 0.0062 respectively defined as the increase in articles per year normalised by the total amount of articles from that country. Out of 20014 papers, 5590 were successfully classified into 14 major topics. The topics that attracted the most publications over the years were medical therapeutics 1808/20014 (9% of articles from 1992 to 2017), followed by surgical treatment 1111/20014 (5.5%), endoscopy 637/20014 (3.2%) and genetics 552/20014 (2.7%), remaining stable through the study period. Conclusion There is a steady growth in the number of IBD-related publications. Although US is a world leader in the number of IBD publications overall, Denmark and Israel publish the most in relation to population size, while China, Romania and Egypt display the highest growth rate in the number of publications. Medical therapeutics is the most popular and best-cited topic.