One of the most compelling pieces of work undertaken by the GALENOS team this year has been the tracking of research topics over time and the identification of “trendy topics” within anxiety, depression, and psychosis.
We want to know what are the most promising and exciting areas of research that can be focused on to help the millions of people living with these conditions worldwide.
The GALENOS team have used artificial intelligence (AI) to catalogue and analyse over 250 million scholarly articles and papers from over a quarter of a million sources by using large language models such as BERTopic and Open Alex.
Large Language Models are a type of AI designed to understand, analyse and generate human language and have helped us to develop an innovative algorithm capable of several key functions:
- Identifying meaningful topics in the published literature.
- Tracking mentions of topics in published literature over time.
- Identifying sudden and significant changes in the level of interest in research topics at specific points in time.
- Predicting interesting research questions.
Our current focus is on developing an evaluation strategy to determine what constitutes 'trendiness'. This involves a blinded evaluation with clinicians, researchers, and individuals with lived experience to see if AI and humans agree on what is trending, interesting, and relevant.
Knowing what is ‘trending’ in research helps scientists to identify gaps in research, identify potential collaborators and make informed predictions about the direction of future research in order to secure support and funding.
The GALENOS team are also exploring the best ways to present this data. Our plan is to build a dynamic web application that allows all researchers to interact with this dataset.
Looking ahead, our vision is to expand beyond the original remit of GALENOS and develop this resource for other fields, such as climate change. This expansion will enable us to apply our innovative approach to a broader range of critical issues, further enhancing the impact of the GALENOS model.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of research in mental health and beyond!
