JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The area of epidemiological criminology studies the intersection between the public health and justice systems focusing on prevalent health issues that affect offending and incarcerated populations. Given the growth in this field in recent years, it is important to understand and assess gaps between research outputs and priorities identified from prisoner health stakeholders.

Objective:

Examine published research outputs in epidemiological criminology to assess gaps between published outputs and current research priorities identified by prison stakeholders.

Methods:

Text mining study. A rule-based method was applied to 23,904 PubMed epidemiological criminology abstracts to extract the study determinants and outcomes (i.e., “themes”). These were mapped against research priorities identified by Australian prison stakeholders to assess differences from research outputs. The income level for the affiliation country of the first authors was also identified to compare the ranking of research priorities in income country groups.

Results:

On an evaluation set of 100 abstracts, the identification of themes returned an F1-Score of 90.0% indicating reliable performance. More than 50% of articles had at least one extracted theme; the most common was substance use (12.9%) followed by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (12.6%). Infectious diseases (24.9%) was the most common research priority category, followed by mental health (24.0%) and alcohol and other drug use (20.5%). A comparison between the extracted themes and the stakeholder priorities showed an alignment for mental health, infectious diseases and alcohol and other drug use. While behaviour and juvenile related themes were common, they did not feature as prison priorities. Most research derived was from high income countries (85.3%) while countries with the lowest income status focused half of their research on infectious diseases (51.6%).

Conclusions:

The frequency of investigated themes may reflect historical developments concerning disease prevalence, treatment advances, and social understandings of illness and incarcerated populations. Differences between income status groups are likely to be explained by local health priorities and immediate health risks. Notable gaps between stakeholder research priorities and research outputs concerned themes more focused on social factors and systems and may reflect publication bias or self-publication-selection highlighting the need for further research on prison health services and social determinants of health.