The Welfare of Beef Cattle in the Scientific Literature From 1990 to 2019: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract

Beef cattle are the third most numerous terrestrial farmed animals worldwide. Factors such as geographical region, animal category, breed, and rearing system pose specific animal welfare challenges that can have an impact on animal and public health. This article uses text mining (TM) and topic analysis (TA) to explore the scientific literature on beef cattle welfare published in English from 1990 to 2019. Our aim was to reveal the main research topics and their evolution over time. Our analysis showed that the three most relevant themes in research since 1990 have to do with calf behaviour and management, efficiency, and environmental sustainability, and the effects of transport and slaughter on meat quality. Topics showing the most marked increase in the number of papers published deal with stakeholders' perceptions and market opportunities for added-value beef products and risk factors for morbidity and mortality, especially in relation to calf health, antimicrobial use, and antimicrobial resistance. The results indicate a particular focus on the welfare of calves, especially in the veal industry. Pain relief during the castration of calves and bulls also featured prominently. Research is also increasingly assessing aspects of beef cattle welfare that are interlinked to meat quality, the social and environmental sustainability of the sector in relation to market opportunities, and public health. The identified topics represent a basic source of information that can be used for further and more detailed analyses (e.g., systematic reviews) focussed on specific research themes or geographical areas.

Percepciones de productores sobre el bienestar de bovinos doble propósito en los llanos Orientales de Colombia

“…La mortalidad de las crías en sistemas de producción bovina, tanto de lechería especializada como de cría, es considerado un problema e indicador de bienestar, debido a que se asocia con una pobre calidad de vida y de sufrimiento (Costa et al, 2019;Nalon et al, 2021). Se estima que la tasa de mortalidad de terneros al destete en sistemas de leche y de carne es hasta 10% (Mee, 2020).…”

Cats’ and dogs’ welfare: text mining and topics modeling analysis of the scientific literature

“…Then, the resulting topics were ranked according to the cumulative probability of the first 15 words of each topic. The individual topics were visualized in a bar histogram representation with the probabilities of the first 15 words within each topic (beta values) and the authors attributed a name to each topic as suggested in the literature ( 36 ).…”

A Scoping Review on GIS Technologies Applied to Farmed Fish Health Management

“…A term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique was applied to weight the number of times a word stem appeared across titles, abstracts, and keywords of the selected records. A research area modelling analysis was carried out using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to generate research theme representations according to the frequency distribution of word stems within titles, abstracts, and keywords via an iterative probabilistic process using a Gibbs sampling option of the research area models package in R. The five generated research themes based on the ten most probable word stems were presented as an unstructured set of word stems using histograms, where every bar representing each word stem is proportional to the probability (beta value) of finding it in a theme [23].…”