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. 2017 Jun 23;7(1):4170.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-04527-6.

Global Trends and Regional Variations in Studies of HIV/AIDS

Arash Baghaei Lakeh  1 , Navid Ghaffarzadegan  2
Affiliations

Global Trends and Regional Variations in Studies of HIV/AIDS

Arash Baghaei Lakeh et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

We conduct textual analysis of a sample of more than 200,000 papers written on HIV/AIDS during the past three decades. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method, we disentangle studies that address behavioral and social aspects from other studies and measure the trends of different topics as related to HIV/AIDS. We show that there is a regional variation in scientists' approach to the problem of HIV/AIDS. Our results show that controlling for the economy, proximity to the HIV/AIDS problem correlates with the extent to which scientists look at the behavioral and social aspects of the disease rather than biomedical.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Trends in HIV/AIDS Publications: (a) global trend of publication; (b) average number of authors per paper; (c) number of countries contributing to HIV/AIDS research.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Share of aggregate BSS topics (left axis) and five individual topics (right axis) in HIV/AIDS research over time.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Share of BSS research in all HIV/AIDS papers of different countries. Note: For example, share of BSS research for Ethiopia is shown at 51% meaning that 51% of HIV/AIDS research content published by Ethiopian authors is on BSS topics. Only countries are shown that have published more than 100 papers during the period 1985 to 2012. Color coded by total number of HIV/AIDS papers.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Regional variation in trends of BSS topics in the context of HIV/AIDS research. NA: North America, WE: Western Europe, AS: South and Southeast Asia, AF: Sub-Saharan Africa.
Figure 5
Figure 5
BSS focus of publications from different countries (average during the period 2006 to 2010) compared to their HIV/AIDS mortality rate in 2005 and GDP per capita (average during 2006 to 2010). Each dot corresponds to a country (Red: North America & Western Europe; Yellow: Southern & Southeast Asia; Gray: Sub-Saharan Africa; Blue: Rest of the world). The solid lines show the correlation lines. Countries that are two standard deviation further from the correlation line are labeled.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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