Half a century of bioethics and philosophy of medicine: A topic‐modeling study

Abstract

Topic modeling-a text-mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts-has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of intertopic correlations, we group the content-based topics into eight clusters, thus providing a novel, fine-grained intellectual map of bioethics and philosophy of medicine. Moreover, we conduct a number of diachronic analyses, examining how the "prominence" of different topics has changed across time. In this way, we are able to observe the distinct patterns in which bioethics and philosophy of medicine have evolved and changed their focus over the past half a century.

The birth of the “digital turn” in bioethics?

“…More recently, Bystranowski and colleagues focused on almost 100 topics in seven bioethics journals, they deepened their approach of topic modeling by adding the diachronic dimension and emphasized that the data does not speak for itself but must be still be interpreted. 46 The determining reasons behind keeping the distance between (mostly) philosophers and computer scientists are not easy to identify and could prompt further studies on the sociology of science and social construction of knowledge. Taking into account Ludwik Fleck's concept of thought collectives, that is, that scientific facts are produced in a sociologically complex way, may serve as an aid to reflect the current situation more properly.…”

The Disconnection That Wasn’t: Philosophy in Modern Bioethics from a Quantitative Perspective

“…Drawing on our previous research (Bystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki 2022), here we focus on two useful perspectives: citation analysis and topic modeling. While the first approach allows us to indirectly measure the level of engagement of bioethicists with philosophical literature (by measuring the proportion of references from articles published in journals in bioethics that cite philosophy journals), the latter provides a window into the content and argumentative style of bioethical texts.…”

“…In our topic model (Bystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki 2022), we identified 91 content-based topics which we interpreted as denoting distinct areas of research present in the target journals. While one perhaps cannot define philosophy in terms of specific contents -any question is a fair game to philosophy -nonetheless some philosophers would find it plausible that some themes -such as metaphysical issues of human identity or the very nature of moral obligations -are paradigmatically "philosophical".…”

“…Measuring correlations between topics' prominence in a text 5 With the linear model providing a null effect of time on the proportion: B = -0.0001, t(46) = -0.93, p = .36. 2 See (Bystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki 2022) for an explanation of how these journals were selected. The partition of the set of journals into bioethics and philosophy of medicine is grounded in topic-correlation-based clustering, for details see https://www.uj.edu.pl/web/incet-bioethics/journal_partition and the proportion of citations from such a text to Philosophy journals provides 6 a relatively rigorous way of identifying such topics (see Figure 2).…”

“…What we actually find is evidence of a moderately positive linear trend for each of the five topics: 0.0009 < Bs < 0.0019, .001 < ps < .003.6 To conduct such an analysis, we had to match our topic modeling data set with Web of Science records. We managed to match 14,213 records, which represents 73% of the corpus analyzed inBystranowski, Dranseika, Żuradzki (2022).…”