Creating enriched training sets of eligible studies for large systematic reviews: the utility of PubMed's Best Match algorithm

Comparison of relative areas of interest between major depression disorder and postpartum depression

INTRODUCTION

Postpartum depression (PPD) is defined as a major depressive disorder (MDD) beginning after childbirth. Wide debates aim to better understand PPD's specificities compared with MDD. One of the keys in differentiating PPD from MDD is to systematically study scientific "Areas Of Interest" (AOIs) of these disorders.

METHODS

In November 2021, we performed an extraction and textual computational analysis of associated terms for PPD and MDD, using the biomedical database PubMed. We performed an undirected lexical network analysis to map the 150 first terms in space. Then, we used an unsupervised machine learning technique to detect word patterns and automatically cluster AOIs with a topic-modeling analysis.

RESULTS

We identified 30,000 articles of the 554,724 articles for MDD and 15,642 articles for PPD. Four AOIs were detected in the MDD network: mood disorders and their treatments, risk factors, consequences and quality of life, and mental health and comorbidities. Five AOIs were detected in the PPD network: mood disorders and treatments, risk factors, consequences and child health, patient's background, and the challenges of screening.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Limitations are both methodological, in particular due to the qualitative interpretation of AOIs, and are also related to the difficult transferability of these research results to the clinical practice. The partial overlap between AOIs for MDD and for PPD suggest that the latter is a particular form of the former.

Information Retrieval and Knowledge Organization: A Perspective from the Philosophy of Science

Information retrieval (IR) is about making systems for finding documents or information. Knowledge organization (KO) is the field concerned with indexing, classification, and representing documents for IR, browsing, and related processes, whether performed by humans or computers. The field of IR is today dominated by search engines like Google. An important difference between KO and IR as research fields is that KO attempts to reflect knowledge as depicted by contemporary scholarship, in contrast to IR, which is based on, for example, “match” techniques, popularity measures or personalization principles. The classification of documents in KO mostly aims at reflecting the classification of knowledge in the sciences. Books about birds, for example, mostly reflect (or aim at reflecting) how birds are classified in ornithology. KO therefore requires access to the adequate subject knowledge; however, this is often characterized by disagreements. At the deepest layer, such disagreements are based on philosophical issues best characterized as “paradigms”. No IR technology and no system of knowledge organization can ever be neutral in relation to paradigmatic conflicts, and therefore such philosophical problems represent the basis for the study of IR and KO.