Text mining for identifying topics in the literatures about adolescent substance use and depression

BACKGROUND: Both adolescent substance use and adolescent depression are major public health problems, and have the tendency to co-occur. Thousands of articles on adolescent substance use or depression have been published. It is labor intensive and time consuming to extract huge amounts of information from the cumulated collections. Topic modeling offers a computational tool to find relevant topics by capturing meaningful structure among collections of documents. METHODS: In this study, a total of 17,723 abstracts from PubMed published from 2000 to 2014 on adolescent substance use and depression were downloaded as objects, and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was applied to perform text mining on the dataset. Word clouds were used to visually display the content of topics and demonstrate the distribution of vocabularies over each topic. RESULTS: The LDA topics recaptured the search keywords in PubMed, and further discovered relevant issues, such as intervention program, association links between adolescent substance use and adolescent depression, such as sexual experience and violence, and risk factors of adolescent substance use, such as family factors and peer networks. Using trend analysis to explore the dynamics of proportion of topics, we found that brain research was assessed as a hot issue by the coefficient of the trend test. CONCLUSIONS: Topic modeling has the ability to segregate a large collection of articles into distinct themes, and it could be used as a tool to understand the literature, not only by recapturing known facts but also by discovering other relevant topics. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-016-2932-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.