Consistency in North Korean Medical Academic Research Topics During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Text Mining Analysis

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic triggered a global shift in medical research priorities, with increased emphasis on infectious disease response and public health. However, little is known about whether similar changes occurred in the People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), a country with limited transparency and access to health data. This study aimed to assess thematic changes in North Korean medical academic research before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing article titles using text mining techniques.

We extracted 8,818 paper titles from six major North Korean medical academic journals published between 2017 and 2022 and categorized them into two periods: pre-pandemic (2017-2019) and pandemic (2020-2022). Morpheme analysis was performed to break down text data into meaningful units, frequency analysis and word cloud visualization were applied to identify and intuitively describe the most frequently occurring terms, and latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling was performed to identify latent topics formed by words that frequently occur simultaneously within the article's title. In addition, the framework of the analysis was divided into two categories: disease and health care service, and the subject-specific changes in each area were analyzed.

During the pandemic, as expected, an increasing proportion of topics related to new infectious diseases was observed. However, the core structure of the research topic remained essentially unchanged over the two periods. In particular, as before the pandemic, surgical treatment-related words accounted for the largest proportion. In LDA thematic modeling, treatment-oriented topics such as drug prescription formed a key group. The majority of COVID-19-related articles tended to focus on clinical management and quarantine rather than basic science or vaccine development.

While the world is focusing on vaccine and quarantine research, the medical research in North Korea maintained a strong focus on solving immediate problems, such as surgical and drug treatment, rather than shifting significantly toward pandemic-specific research. This means that medical academic research in North Korea tends to adhere to the existing research system rather than responding to external crises. In conclusion, identifying this pattern provides essential insights for predicting North Korea's capacity to respond and its limitations in the event of another health crisis in the future.