Arshadi Homa, Hosseini Golkar Mostafa, Zahedi Zohreh, Ashrafi Maryam, Okhovati Maryam
Faculty of Management and Medical Information Sciences, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
Medical Informatics Research Center, Institute for Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
Med J Islam Repub Iran. 2025 Feb 1;39:18. doi: 10.47176/mjiri.39.18. eCollection 2025.
The convergence of scientific research and technological breakthroughs is critical to societal health. However, both academic literature and patents can grow at separate rates, leading to gaps in fields like breast cancer. This study aims to identify and bridge the gap between science and technology in breast cancer research through scenario planning.
This research is a foresight study conducted using the scenario technique method. A total of 191,871 papers and 9085 patents on breast cancer, published between 2012 and 2021, were analyzed using data from the Web of Science Core Collection and PATSTAT databases. Text mining was conducted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling technique with Python libraries to identify subject clusters and areas of asynchrony. The scenario technique was then developed, aimed at bridging the gap between science and technology.
Our findings revealed that scientific output in breast cancer has greatly surpassed technical advancements, indicating gaps in several key domains. Scientific papers in our dataset, mostly concentrated on the complexities of breast cancer-including genetic mutations, hormone receptors, dietary factors, and environmental influences-whereas the analyzed patents frequently addressed lesser-known areas such as herbal medicine, medical devices, protective clothing, and micro ribonucleic acid therapies. To fill these gaps, 4 scenarios were created and, some effective actions for each scenario were recommended.
Different priorities emerged across the 16 proposed actions for the 3 specific scenarios-excluding the favorable scenario. In all scenarios, enhancing stakeholder ties, establishing cooperative networks, and developing collaborative incentive systems were identified as key strategies for diminishing the gap between science and technology in breast cancer.
科学研究与技术突破的融合对社会健康至关重要。然而，学术文献和专利可能以不同的速度增长，导致乳腺癌等领域出现差距。本研究旨在通过情景规划来识别并弥合乳腺癌研究中科学与技术之间的差距。
本研究是一项采用情景技术方法进行的前瞻性研究。利用科学网核心合集和PATSTAT数据库的数据，对2012年至2021年间发表的191,871篇关于乳腺癌的论文和9085项专利进行了分析。使用Python库中的潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）主题建模技术进行文本挖掘，以识别主题集群和不同步的领域。然后开发了情景技术，旨在弥合科学与技术之间的差距。
我们的研究结果表明，乳腺癌领域的科学产出已大大超过技术进步，这表明在几个关键领域存在差距。我们数据集中的科学论文大多集中在乳腺癌的复杂性上，包括基因突变、激素受体、饮食因素和环境影响，而分析的专利则经常涉及鲜为人知的领域，如草药医学、医疗设备、防护服和微核糖核酸疗法。为了填补这些差距，创建了4个情景，并针对每个情景推荐了一些有效行动。
除了有利情景外，针对3个特定情景提出的16项行动出现了不同的优先事项。在所有情景中，加强利益相关者联系、建立合作网络和制定合作激励系统被确定为缩小乳腺癌研究中科学与技术差距的关键策略。
