Understand Research Hotspots Surrounding COVID-19 and Other Coronavirus Infections Using Topic Modeling

Mengying Dong; Xiaojun Cao; Mingbiao Liang; Lijuan Li; Huiying Liang; Guangjian Liu

In conclusion, this study specifically shows a holistic picture of the current research in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. We conducted a topic-based bibliometric study to address two questions "What is the CoVs research interested in?" and "Where are we with our research about COVID-19?". An LDA-based model was used to identify the hotspots and their difference between COVID-19 and other CoV infections in a quantitative way. Generally, eight main research areas are identified, i.e., clinical characterization, pathogenesis research, therapeutics research, epidemiological study, virus transmission, vaccines research, virus diagnostics, and viral genomics. The results also indicate that studies in diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines, viral genomics, and pathogenesis are urgently needed to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. As COVID-19 can be considered a recent emerged disease, we characterize a 'snapshot' of this field at an early stage in its development. Our findings can potentially aid governments and the research community in understanding recent development of the research field, optimizing research topic decision, and monitoring new scientific or technological activities. . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.