ArticleBMC medical education2026
Past, present, and future of virtual reality-based biological science education (2010-2025): a BERTopic-driven analysis.
Article in BMC medical education, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) is transforming biological science education through the creation of immersive simulated environments. This study employs the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Topic (BERTopic) modeling technique to conduct a structural and evolutionary analysis of the literature on VR in biological science education from January 2010 to July 2025. By analyzing 164 peer-reviewed articles, we identified five core research topics and mapped their structural relationships and temporal evolution. The results reveal a core-satellite structure within the field, with technology-enhanced education in biological design (Topic 0) as the central topic, surrounded by specialized subfields such as data and imaging methods for integrated realities (Topic 2) and immersive technology and long-term memory (Topic 3), both of which have demonstrated synchronous growth since 2018. The study delineates a pedagogical framework encompassing content construction, immersive experience, assessment, and application. These findings provide data-driven evidence to support educational institutions in strategically allocating resources, particularly toward the emerging frontiers such as data integration and cognitive enhancement, thereby optimizing curriculum design and VR implementation in biological science education.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.