Characterising the Scope of Exposome Research: A Generalisable Approach

Scientific advancement and the development of new research fields bring uncertainties about what the current topics of research emphasis are and thus, what new knowledge might need to be represented. The exposome is an example of one such new field for which these uncertainties exist. The exposome is the analogue to the genome, from an environmental exposure perspective; research on the exposome has gained momentum only since 2011. In this work, we propose a generally applicable methodology that aims to characterise the landscape of a new research area based on linguistic analysis of its associated publications. Using abstracts of 261 exposome research articles, we illustrate a methodology that combines (1) inductive analysis based on word frequency counts, and term analysis to identify the topics, methods and applications of the new field and (2) deductive analysis using the NCBO Ontology Recommender to identify to what extent this new area is covered by current knowledge representation tools. Applying this method to the exposome literature, we uncover both the current focus of exposome research and the ontologies that are most relevant to the domain.