This study aimed to quantitatively examine contemporary occupational therapy research topics by applying natural language processing to articles submitted to the Journal of Japanese Occupational Therapy Association. The target was abstracts of original papers published in the journal Occupational Therapy from volume 38 to volume 42, issue 2. Research topics and their time-series changes were extracted from the abstracts by BERTopic, which can extract textual topics. Five topics were extracted: qualitative study, evaluation tool development, stroke patient's ability to perform activities of daily living after discharge from the hospital, the effects of modified CI therapy, and health and occupational participation of the elderly community. The results suggest that two topics, qualitative study and evaluation tool development, are specific to the current era, while the other three are common research topics from the past.
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