Examining the Historical Development of Techno-Scientific Biomedical Communication in Russia

The article focuses on the shift from traditional to techno-scientific biomedical discourse in health-related media communication. The Russian case should be put in context of successes and failures of governmental policies and campaigns, as well as diverse changes in social life that took place in the last decade. To this end, we developed a method for the reconstruction of the timeline that triggered the ongoing techno-scientific progress in Russia based on the decade-long history of healthcare media reports. The dataset includes news reports collected using health and medicine-related keywords from two prominent Russian newspapers ("Rossiyskaya Gazeta" and "Kommersant", from 2010 to 2019). The method employs text-mining tools including topic modelling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation-based), term statistics and graphs of keyphrase relationships to analyze the dynamics of media communication in healthcare during the study period. The results of the study confirm that before 2015 the coverage of health-associated topics includes criminal incidents and the "modernization" of the state healthcare system. After 2016, we detected the spread of a new discourse related to drugs elabeling, new drugs, networks and databases development.