Using Text Mining to Identify Trends in Oropharyngeal Dysphagia Research: A Proof of Concept

Abstract

Objectives: Meta-research can provide valuable insights into patterns in research. Text mining as a specific method to carry out meta-research has been less explored by the speechlanguage pathologist community. The purpose of this article is to delineate the history of research trends in the area of oropharyngeal dysphagia and its evolution across the past five decades. It also aims to identify hidden patterns in the research field using a combination of text mining and bibliometric-scientometric techniques. Methods: We utilized quantitative and qualitative approaches through text mining techniques in the background of scientometric and bibliometric analyses. Abstracts of the articles were text mined from the Scopus database and were subjected to hierarchical cluster analysis and co-occurrence networks analyses. The frequency of published research across journals as well as amount of research articles published overtime were calculated. Results: A total of 1,526 articles were published in the area of oropharyngeal dysphagia across 60 journals in the Scopus database. The evolution of research themes has been described. Conclusion: The present study summarizes the research that has been carried out from 1970 till present in the area of oropharyngeal dysphagia using a text mining technique. Dysphagia research has evolved to be truly multi-disciplinary, as contribution from various professionals could be observed. The research area of oropharyngeal dysphagia continues to pose new challenges and offers wider prospects for further research.