Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modeling to Uncover Latent Research Topics and Trends in Renal Cell Carcinoma: Bibliometric Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is a common, often lethal kidney cancer that originates in the renal cortex. Its incidence is rising, and major factors include smoking, obesity, and hypertension, though its etiology is uncertain. While surgery is effective for localized RCC, treatments for metastatic RCC have advanced significantly due to better diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive tools. Despite this progress, challenges remain, including long-term drug resistance and the complexity of RCC as a diverse group of diseases rather than a single entity. Objective: The aim of this bibliometric review was a comprehensive analysis of the topics and trends in RCC research, offering a foundation for future investigations. Methods: We used R "Bibliometrix" to conduct a bibliographic search in Scopus and PubMed covering publications from 1975 to 2023 to statistically assess the distribution of publications associated with RCC by year, journal, and country. Topic modeling of RCC research was conducted using latent Dirichlet allocation, a Bayesian network-based probabilistic algorithm that identifies unobserved thematic clusters in a collection of text documents. Trends in the retrieved themes were then characterized by using regression slopes over time, across countries, and in different journals. These trends were visualized as a heatmap, which was then used for hierarchical clustering to group similar topics based on their correlation strengths. Results: A total of 35,228 documents from 3070 sources were found, with a steady yearly growth of 9.86% and 118 participating countries. Thirty topics with the best coherence score were found in 8 crucial domains: treatment and therapies, biomolecular and genetic characteristics, disease characteristics and progression, diagnosis and evaluation, metastasis and dissemination, epidemiology and risk factors, related conditions, and pathological features. The pertinent clustergrams that resulted from the heatmaps mirrored the latent Dirichlet allocation's algorithm identification of major RCC research subjects. Conclusions: Over 50 years, RCC research's focus has shifted from diagnosis and assessment to a more thorough understanding of disease characteristics and progression. Because many patients are diagnosed with abdominal imaging studies, an emerging topic in RCC is diagnostic imaging and radiological evolution. The advances in omics technologies and the function of microRNA signature in the progression, diagnosis, therapy targeting, and prognosis of RCC have garnered a lot of attention. The discovery of the genetic background has enhanced our understanding of the growth of RCC. Drug resistance, local RCC ablation, and postoperative surveillance of RCC recurrence following nephrectomy are key future research avenues. The next generation of drug-targeted therapy and immunotherapy will make it possible to successfully treat metastatic RCC following nephrectomy. Neglected topics include the association between ferroptosis and RCC, the long-term assessment of novel treatments, and the application of artificial intelligence on RCC. Our bibliographic review delivered pertinent data for clinical decision-making and the planning of future RCC research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.123 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.153 | 0.180 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".