1 National Research Council Canada, Montréal, QC H3T 1J4 Canada.
2 Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, QC H3G 2W1 Canada.
3 National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, ON K1K 2E1 Canada.
4 National Research Council Canada, Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4 Canada.
5 Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3 Canada.
6 Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada.
7 Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada.

Understanding the temporal evolution of COVID-19 research through machine learning and natural language processing.

Scientometrics. 2020 Nov 19; :1-15

Authors: Ebadi A, Xi P, Tremblay S, Spencer B, Pall R, Wong A

Abstract

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been continuously affecting human lives and communities around the world in many ways, from cities under lockdown to new social experiences. Although in most cases COVID-19 results in mild illness, it has drawn global attention due to the extremely contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2. Governments and healthcare professionals, along with people and society as a whole, have taken any measures to break the chain of transition and flatten the epidemic curve. In this study, we used multiple data sources, i.e., PubMed and ArXiv, and built several machine learning models to characterize the landscape of current COVID-19 research by identifying the latent topics and analyzing the temporal evolution of the extracted research themes, publications similarity, and sentiments, within the time-frame of January-May 2020. Our findings confirm the types of research available in PubMed and ArXiv differ significantly, with the former exhibiting greater diversity in terms of COVID-19 related issues and the latter focusing more on intelligent systems/tools to predict/diagnose COVID-19. The special attention of the research community to the high-risk groups and people with complications was also confirmed.

PMID: 33230352 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]