Understanding the Correlations between Social Attention and Topic Trends of Scientific Publications

• 作者: Chenwei Zhang Jian Xu Kunpeng Zhang Min Song Xianlei Dong Ying Ding
• 来源期刊: 数据与情报科学学报：英文版
• 学科: 社会科学
• 关键词: 《数据与情报科学学报》 英文版
• 年，卷（期）: 2016,（1）
• 页码范围: 28-49
• 页数: 22页
• 分类号: G2

摘要

Purpose:We propose and apply a simplified nowcasting model to understand the correlations between social attention and topic trends of scientific publications.Design/methodology/approach:First,topics are generated from the obesity corpus by using the latent Dirichlet allocation(LDA) algorithm and time series of keyword search trends in Google Trends are obtained.We then establish the structural time series model using data from January 2004 to December 2012,and evaluate the model using data from January 2013.We employ a state-space model to separate different non-regression components in an observational time series(i.e.the tendency and the seasonality) and apply the 'spike and slab prior' and stepwise regression to analyze the correlations between the regression component and the social media attention.The two parts are combined using Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques to obtain our results.Findings:The results of our study show that(1) the number of publications on child obesity increases at a lower rate than that of diabetes publications;(2) the number of publication on a given topic may exhibit a relationship with the season or time of year;and(3) there exists a correlation between the number of publications on a given topic and its social media attention,i.e.the search frequency related to that topic as identified by Google Trends.We found that our model is also able to predict the number of publications related to a given topic.Research limitations:First,we study a correlation rather than causality between topics’ trends and social media.As a result,the relationships might not be robust,so we cannotpredict the future in the long run.Second,we cannot identify the reasons or conditions that are driving obesity topics to present such tendencies and seasonal patterns,so we might need to do 'field' study in the future.Third,we need to improve the efficiency of our model by finding more efficient variable selection models,because the stepwise regression method is time consuming,especially for a large