Let’s start at the beginning. Health outcomes can vary for no other reason than where people are born. And this isn’t even a “developed” vs. “developing” country distinction. In the US, zip code can be a huge predictor of health outcomes. This has been known for a long time and a major driven force in many health initiatives. For those of us trying to make a dent in community-level conditions, this finding isn’t good.
Further, good health equity research likely pulls from both the research world (so, evidence-based practices) and findings from the field (so practice-based evidence). It’s pretty hard to pull from community-based evidence for a bunch of reasons. Many people don’t publish because of competing priorities. There’s no common organizing database to index results (apart from what standard web crawlers find).
For the time being, I put together another PubTrawlr monthly report to at least catch the peer-reviewed published literature. The good news is that there’s actually multiple journals focusing on the topics. I plotted a good old’ word cloud below.
![](https://dawnchorusgroup.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/image-3.png?w=850)
In addition to the clustering algorithms in PubTrawlr, I’ve also started flagging review articles. Systematic reviews can be a really good place to start when engaging with any new topic. The International Journal for Equity in Health has been publishing a ton of reviews over the past month. That indicator article looks particularly useful in a lot of the work I’m doing with the WE in the World team.
![](https://dawnchorusgroup.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/image-5.png?w=1024)
In terms of the topics, a lot of articles coming out of NCI, which also has a really really strong implementation science push. They fund a ton of research grants, research centers, and fellowships.
![](https://dawnchorusgroup.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/image-6.png?w=1024)
Okay, but what about the grey literature? This is where we can find other work that doesn’t make it’s way into indexed databases. Sorry, everyone: this is an open problem. It’s extremely difficult to collect “everything” in a way that adds to a synthesis project. We’re currently identifying different databases and APIs that allow us to incorporate grey findings into our synthesis. However, one of the major barriers is how to automate a quality check, since a grey source likely will have not undergone peer review. Not that peer review is the be-all, end-all, but it’s currently the best method that we have for ensuring quality prior to dissemination. But, if you have any ideas, we have room for you at PubTrawlr –> contact me at jon [at] pubtrawlr.com
Read the full analysis over at PubTrawlr, and don’t forget to sign up for an account; it’s free! Safe Harbor, our brand new dynamic discussion board, awaits!
Another great photo from unsplash as the header. Credit to Mufid Majnun.