Semi-automated extraction of research topics and trends from NCI funding in radiological sciences from 2000-2020
This provides insight for funders, investigators, and the public on funding allocation and research trends in radiological sciences, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The researchers tackled the problem of manually categorizing topics and trends in publicly funded research by developing a semi-automated approach to extract and name research topics from $1.9B of NCI funding in radiological sciences over 21 years, finding that funding for therapeutics- and physics-based research outpaced diagnostics- and biology-based research.
Investigators, funders, and the public desire knowledge on topics and trends in publicly funded research but current efforts in manual categorization are limited in scale and understanding. We developed a semi-automated approach to extract and name research topics, and applied this to \$1.9B of NCI funding over 21 years in the radiological sciences to determine micro- and macro-scale research topics and funding trends. Our method relies on sequential clustering of existing biomedical-based word embeddings, naming using subject matter experts, and visualization to discover trends at a macroscopic scale above individual topics. We present results using 15 and 60 cluster topics, where we found that 2D projection of grant embeddings reveals two dominant axes: physics-biology and therapeutic-diagnostic. For our dataset, we found that funding for therapeutics- and physics-based research have outpaced diagnostics- and biology-based research, respectively. We hope these results may (1) give insight to funders on the appropriateness of their funding allocation, (2) assist investigators in contextualizing their work and explore neighboring research domains, and (3) allow the public to review where their tax dollars are being allocated.