Text Mining of the Medical Literature

In this project, I asked the question: How has the language of clinical investigation changed in the last 40 years, and what can we learn from this? I downloaded >300,000 PubMed records from 5 premier medical journals and focused on trends in article titles, identifying monograms (single words) or bigrams (adjacent pairs of words) with significant increases or decreases in frequency between the 1976-2015.

Focusing on titles of JAMA articles, I observed a number of interesting trends:

• The biggest change was a meteoric rise in the use of epidemiological terms (“randomized”, “trial”, “outcomes”, “risk”)
• There was a decline in the language of causality (“caused by”, “cause of”) with a concomitant increase in “association between”, “association of”
• The use of “the elderly” decreased significantly over time, while “older adults” and “older patients” has become more popular
• While “diabetes” was one of the top increased words, “diabetic” has become less popular. In general, we observed a trend in titles to separate patient from disease; while articles from prior decades would refer to “diabetic patients” or guidelines for “the diabetic”, recent decades are more likely to refer to “patients with diabetes” or “adults with diabetes”
• This trend toward separation of patient and disease was consistent in 4/5 journals, in which use of a patient-centered noun in the title (rather than the disease process alone) has became a much more common way to refer to medical entities

Chen GM, Pather SR, DeLisser HM. Trends in the Use of Common Words and Patient-Centric Language in the Titles of Medical Journals, 1976-2015.
JAMA Network Open (2019).