Scoping Review of Mindfulness Research: a Topic Modelling Approach

Abstract

As the volume of mindfulness research continues amassing exponentially, there have been attempts to review works in various aspects of mindfulness research systematically. The present study provides a scoping review via a topic modelling approach to supplement the overall research synthesis effort. Specifically, the objective is to scope the mindfulness research by identifying topics relevant to mindfulness research using the probabilistic topic modelling approach. A literature search based on “mindfulness” returned 5947 bibliographical records from the Web of Science Core Collection platform (for records up to 20 October 2017). The combined field of titles and abstracts was subjected to probabilistic topic modelling based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). The optimal number of topics suggested was 106. Further interpretation by the research team resulted in a total of 231 Suggested Terms. The terms were further categorised into Condition/Issue, Construct/Philosophy, Modality, Population/Setting and Research Methodology. The topic modelling process obtained a panoptic view of mindfulness research, providing mindfulness researchers with some indicators regarding the range of topics researched. The outcome of this topic modelling effort has been made available at https://hdl.handle.net/10497/20862 .