Looking back to look ahead: a BERTopic-assisted scoping review of Medical Humanities (2000–2025)

This study provides a scoping review of the periodical BMJ Medical Humanities in order to identify thematic changes evident in the journal between 2000 to 2025. Metadata for the review, including abstracts, publication years, authors and PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs), were gathered from PubMed, followed by data cleaning to remove partial and duplicate documents; the resulting final corpus consisted of 912 open access validated sources. Analysis was conducted in three parts: (1) Prevalent topics were identified using BERTopic, a topic-modelling approach based on transformers well suited to large corpora; (2) Themes were created using a synthesis of machine-derived topics; and (3) Data were visualised through R to identify changes in the themes. Five overarching themes emerged from the analysis: The Patient Journeys & Specific Conditions has grown significantly since 2015, indicating a growing interest in the journal towards articles addressing phenomenology, stigma, disabilities and personal experiences. Meanwhile, Narrative & Arts in Health and History & Culture of Medicine have remained foundational while Practice & Education and Mind, Body & Ethics remain reflective themes. This paper highlights the debate between narrative medicine and narrative humility and the importance of critical and posthumanist perspectives, thereby promoting structural and phenomenological research approaches. The study’s findings may be limited by its use of abstracts only in topic modelling and the sensitivity of machine learning parameters. The study concludes with a discussion on its findings’ implications for justice-based education in the medical humanities and mixed-methods syntheses in the field.