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

TL;DR

This paper employs machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 research from January to May 2020, revealing differences in research focus and highlighting key themes and sentiments.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology to characterize COVID-19 research trends and themes using data from PubMed and ArXiv, with analysis of temporal evolution and research focus.

Findings

PubMed shows greater diversity in COVID-19 research topics.

ArXiv focuses more on intelligent systems for diagnosis.

Research emphasizes high-risk groups and complications.

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.