Simplifying synthesis of the expanding glioblastoma literature: a topic modeling approach

Purpose: Our study aims to discover the leading topics within glioblastoma (GB) research, and to examine if these topics have “hot” or “cold” trends. Additionally, we aim to showcase the potential of natural language processing (NLP) in facilitating research syntheses, offering an efficient strategy to dissect the landscape of academic literature in the realm of GB research. Methods: The Scopus database was queried using “glioblastoma” as the search term, in the “TITLE” and “KEY” fields. BERTopic, an NLP-based topic modeling (TM) method, was used for probabilistic TM. We specified a minimum topic size of 300 documents and 5% probability cutoff for outlier detection. We labeled topics based on keywords and representative documents and visualized them with word clouds. Linear regression models were utilized to identify “hot” and “cold” topic trends per decade. Results: Our TM analysis categorized 43,329 articles into 15 distinct topics. The most common topics were Genomics, Survival, Drug Delivery, and Imaging, while the least common topics were Surgical Resection, MGMT Methylation, and Exosomes. The hottest topics over the 2020s were Viruses and Oncolytic Therapy, Anticancer Compounds, and Exosomes, while the cold topics were Surgical Resection, Angiogenesis, and Tumor Metabolism. Conclusion: Our NLP methodology provided an extensive analysis of GB literature, revealing valuable insights about historical and contemporary patterns difficult to discern with traditional techniques. The outcomes offer guidance for research directions, policy, and identifying emerging trends. Our approach could be applied across research disciplines to summarize and examine scholarly literature, guiding future exploration.