Happy Birthday, PubTrawlr! Today is the day PubTrawlr moves live and open for business. In honor of this occasion, I fired it up for one of my favorite topics; barriers and facilitators.

In my humble opinion, barriers and facilitators work is stale. I think I’ve read hundreds of versions of the sentence, “Leadership and buy-in was noted as an important facilitator. Lack of resource and time was noted as a barrier.” PubTrawlr returned close to 3000 articles on the topic; what do we see?

First up, we see the research clustering around content areas. Specifically, there are things around vaccinations, HIV, cervical cancer, palliative care, and smoking cessation. A biggy, though, is topic 21, which is clearly around the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) has really become the dominant paradigm in structuring studies over the past decade. You can read all about it here.

This domination is further seen in the total number of articles containing CFIR. It comes up section to topic 2 on employment, with around 175 articles. From my reading, no other framework, including my humble R=MC² comes anywhere close.

These two graphs show what distinguishing these topics from one another, but what about themes that run across all 3000 articles? A network graph can give us a high-level picture of word pairs and strings.

These picture really pick up on methods (this is clearly an inquiry area that benefits having mixed methods), but it’s super interesting that the most frequently occurring content area is physical activity and palliative care. What we don’t see here is time, leadership, and any of the heavy hitters that normally appear. So, maybe I’m wrong about that…

This is just a small example of the types of things that PubTrawlr can do (The UMAP figure in the header is my personal favorite). To learn more, just click below and start exploring!