The emergence and evolution of the research fronts in HIV/AIDS research.

David Fajardo-Ortiz,Victor M Castano,Miguel Lara,Hector Ochoa,Michel Dumontier,Luis Duran,Malaquias Lopez-Cervantes,Dimitrios Paraskevis

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178293

David Fajardo-Ortiz, Victor M Castano + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178293

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Abstract

In this paper, we have identified and analyzed the emergence, structure and dynamics of the paradigmatic research fronts that established the fundamentals of the biomedical knowledge on HIV/AIDS. A search of papers with the identifiers "HIV/AIDS", "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", “HIV-1” and "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome" in the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), was carried out. A citation network of those papers was constructed. Then, a sub-network of the papers with the highest number of inter-citations (with a minimal in-degree of 28) was selected to perform a combination of network clustering and text mining to identify the paradigmatic research fronts and analyze their dynamics. Thirteen research fronts were identified in this sub-network. The biggest and oldest front is related to the clinical knowledge on the disease in the patient. Nine of the fronts are related to the study of specific molecular structures and mechanisms and two of these fronts are related to the development of drugs. The rest of the fronts are related to the study of the disease at the cellular level. Interestingly, the emergence of these fronts occurred in successive "waves" over the time which suggest a transition in the paradigmatic focus. The emergence and evolution of the biomedical fronts in HIV/AIDS research is explained not just by the partition of the problem in elements and interactions leading to increasingly specialized communities, but also by changes in the technological context of this health problem and the dramatic changes in the epidemiological reality of HIV/AIDS that occurred between 1993 and 1995.

Highlights

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a global health problem: over 70 million people have been infected with HIV, 35 million have died and 36.7 million people currently live with the disease [1]
HIV/AIDS is studied by a plurality of biomedical disciplines like epidemiology [4], virology [5], immunology [6] or drug development [7] and non-biomedical disciplines like social sciences [8] and humanities [9]
All the biomedical disciplines working on HIV/AIDS strongly rely on a solid scientific consensus, which explains the clinical manifestation of HIV/AIDS in terms of the virus interactions with the immune system cells; the behavior and demography of the immune system cells, and, most importantly, the virus interaction with the biomolecular machinery of the host cells [10,11,12]

Summary

Introduction

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a global health problem: over 70 million people have been infected with HIV, 35 million have died and 36.7 million people currently live with the disease [1]. GOPubMed [2] and more than 42,000 papers (mentioning HIV/AIDS in the title) in the Web of Science [3] spanning over thirty year of scientific research. HIV/AIDS is studied by a plurality of biomedical disciplines like epidemiology [4], virology [5], immunology [6] or drug development [7] and non-biomedical disciplines like social sciences [8] and humanities [9]. Two features are believed to be at the core of the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS: the natural history of the HIV infection (the number of CD4+ cells and HIV RNA copies plotted over the time) [11] and the virus replication cycle (from the virus entry to the virus assembly, budding and maturation) [10, 12]

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