JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly all aspects of life and has posed significant threats to international health and the economy. Given the rapidly unfolding nature of the current pandemic, there is an urgent need to streamline literature synthesis of the growing scientific research to elucidate targeted solutions. While traditional systematic literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have restrictions, including analyzing a limited number of papers, having various biases, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, incapable of trend analysis, and lack of data-driven tools.

Objective:

This study fills the mentioned restrictions in the literature and practice by analyzing two biomedical concepts, clinical manifestations of disease and therapeutic chemical compounds, with text mining methods in a corpus containing COVID-19 research papers and find associations between the two biomedical concepts.

Methods:

This research has collected papers representing COVID-19 pre-prints and peer-reviewed research published in 2020. We used frequency analysis to find highly frequent manifestations and therapeutic chemicals, representing the importance of the two biomedical concepts. This study also applied topic modeling to find the relationship between the two biomedical concepts.

Results:

We analyzed 9,298 research papers published through May 5, 2020 and found 3,645 disease-related and 2,434 chemical-related articles. The most frequent clinical manifestations of disease terminology included COVID-19, SARS, cancer, pneumonia, fever, and cough. The most frequent chemical-related terminology included Lopinavir, Ritonavir, Oxygen, Chloroquine, Remdesivir, and water. Topic modeling provided 25 categories showing relationships between our two overarching categories. These categories represent statistically significant associations between multiple aspects of each category, some connections of which were novel and not previously identified by the scientific community.

Conclusions:

Appreciation of this context is vital due to the lack of a systematic large-scale literature review survey and the importance of fast literature review during the current COVID-19 pandemic for developing treatments. This study is beneficial to researchers for obtaining a macro-level picture of literature, to educators for knowing the scope of literature, to journals for exploring most discussed disease symptoms and pharmaceutical targets, and to policymakers and funding agencies for creating scientific strategic plans regarding COVID-19.