Abstract
Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is therefore unsurprising that there is a high volume of public discussions, resources, and research tackling various aspects of the disease. This study describes a new method for identifying areas of public interest in issues like diabetes and compares them to the topics being discussed in research. We tested our method by using posts from a popular diabetes discussion forum (DiabeticConnect), pages (articles) about diabetes published on Wikipedia, and the titles and abstracts of research articles about diabetes from the Scopus database. Tags assigned to each post in the discussion forum were used along with the post itself to compute a Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA) model, which was then used to classify the Wikipedia pages and research articles. The resulting classifications were then used to compare the prevalence of the topics found in the discussion forum with that in the other two sources. The results show that the public interest in diabetes is not necessarily addressed by researchers. More importantly, the alignment and misalignment in the changes in relative interest over the various topics are evidence that LLDA modeling can be useful for comparing a public corpus, like a diabetes forum, and an academic one, like research article titles and abstracts. The success of using LLDA to classify research articles based on the tags assigned to posts in a public discussion forum shows that this a promising method for better understanding how the scientific community responds to public interests and needs.
Highlights
Diabetes is a serious health problem that has nearly doubled in prevalence among adults in the last three decades
The alignment between the forum, Wikipedia, and research topics Health is the most frequent topic extracted from both research articles and Wikipedia articles, but since it is a very general topic and does not relate to diabetes, we excluded the topic from further analysis
While a high percentage of the research articles and Wikipedia articles are about diabetes testing, control, and treatments, a large number of forum posts discussed emotional support and motivation for patients and diabetes diet, topics that are not found among the most popular topics in the research literature
Summary
Diabetes is a serious health problem that has nearly doubled in prevalence among adults in the last three decades. Like online community forums, have been found to be largely free of misinformation (Balkhi et al 2014). Such forums have become spaces where diabetes patients share their experiences, seek information, ask for help, and receive support from others who have the same health concerns (Hilliard et al 2015; Greene et al 2011; Ravert, Hancock, & Ingersoll 2004). Research shows that online social ties, such as those that develop when interacting in an online forum, can have a positive impact on improving health and decreasing health-related anxiety among patients with chronic diseases, including diabetes (Hilliard et al 2015; Balkhi et al 2014; Sarasohn-Kahn, 2008)
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