Analyzing the research trends of COVID-19 using topic modeling approach

Abstract

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted 222 countries across the globe, with millions of people losing their lives. The threat from the virus may be assessed from the fact that most countries across the world have been forced to order partial or complete shutdown of their economies for a period of time to contain the spread of the virus. The fallout of this action manifested in loss of livelihood, migration of the labor force and severe impact on mental health due to the long duration of confinement to homes or residences. Design/methodology/approach The current study identifies the focus areas of the research conducted on the COVID-19 pandemic. Abstracts of papers on the subject were collated from the SCOPUS database for the period December 2019 to June 2020. The collected sample data (after preprocessing) was analyzed using Topic Modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Findings Based on the research papers published within the mentioned timeframe, the study identifies the 10 most prominent topics that formed the area of interest for the COVID-19 pandemic research. Originality/value While similar studies exist, no other work has used topic modeling to comprehensively analyze the COVID-19 literature by considering diverse fields and domains.