Current status of book publishing in the field of biological weapons defense in China

Abstract

ObjectiveTo provide scientific support for the compilation of high-quality anti-nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) medical textbooks in China by retrieving books in the field of biological weapons defense in China, summarizing the publication time and distribution of publishing institutions, and categorizing content and key points of related books.MethodsRelevant subject terms in the field of biological weapons defense were searched through the official website of China National Digital Library and other websites, up until December 31, 2023, and were limited to books. Topic analysis was conducted on the introductions and contents of the books using the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. The number of topics was determined based on perplexity, and topics were identified according to the intertopic distance map, followed by a qualitative description of the core content of each topic.ResultsA total of 104 books were included in this study, among which four were identified as higher educational textbooks. The volume of publications increased during the periods 2002‒2004 and 2020‒2023. Research institutions accounted for the highest percentage of publishers (37.78%), and 56.67% of the publishers were military institutions. The study identified six topics: "distribution, defense, and response to biological weapons", "category, diagnosis, and treatment of biological warfare agents", "response to biological public health emergencies", "status of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons internationally", "biosafety risk management and prevention and control", and "technologies and equipment related to biological hazard identification".ConclusionThere are few books in the field of biological weapons defense in China and the content is relatively outdated. In the future, the preparation of teaching materials should be aimed at practical emergency handling techniques for biological weapons, enhance the emphasis on biological weapons detection and biological warfare early warning, improve the fundamental theories at different training levels, and timely update the current research status in the field.

Keywords

• biological weapon
• anti-nuclear, biological, and chemical (nbc) medicine
• military education
• medical textbook