What’s hot and what’s not? - Exploring trends in bioinformatics literature using topic modeling and keyword analysis

Abstract

Scientists exploring a new area of research are interested to know the “hot” topics in that area in order to make informed choices. With exponential growth in scientific literature, identifying such trends manually is not easy. Topic modeling has emerged as an effective approach to analyze large volumes of text. While this approach has been applied on literature in other scientific areas, there has been no formal analysis of bioinformatics literature. Here, we conduct keyword and topic model-based analysis on bioinformatics literature starting from 1998 to 2016. We identify top keywords and topics per year and explore temporal popularity trends of those keywords/areas. Network analysis was conducted to identify clusters of sub-areas/topics in bioinformatics. We found that “big-data”, “next generation sequencing”, and “cancer” all experienced exponential increase in popularity over the years. On the other hand, interest in drug discovery has plateaued after the early 2000s.