JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The field of epidemiological criminology (or justice health research) has emerged in the past decade studying the intersection between the public health and justice systems. To ensure research efforts are focused and equitable, it is important to reflect on the outputs in this area and address knowledge gaps.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to examine populations researched in a large sample of published outputs and identify research gaps and biases.

Methods:

A rule-based text mining method was applied to 34,481 PubMed abstracts published from 1963 to 2023 to identify four population characteristics (sex, age, offender type, nationality).

Results:

We evaluated our method in a random sample of 100 PubMed abstracts. Micro-precision was 94.3% with micro-recall at 85.9% and micro-F1-Score at 89.9% across the four characteristics. Half of the abstracts did not have any characteristic mentions (49.4%; 17,039) and only 1.3% (443) reported sex, age, offender type and nationality. From 5,170 (14.9%) abstracts that reported age, 7 out of 10 (69.3%) mentioned young people (under 18 years) and 6 out of 10 (58.7%) abstracts reported adults. Since 1990, studies reporting female only populations increased and in 2023 accounted for almost half of research outputs (48.6%) as opposed to 33.1% for male only populations. Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark) had the highest number of abstracts proportional to their incarcerated population. Mentally ill offenders were the most common group of interest (17.4%) with an increase from 1990 onwards.

Conclusions:

Research reporting on female populations increased and surpassed those involving men despite women representing 5% of the incarcerated population suggesting male prisoners are under researched. Although it has been suggested that the justice health area should focus more on juveniles, our results showed a high number of age reporting abstracts mentioning a population age below 18 years old reflecting a rise of youth involvement in the youth justice system. Those convicted of sex offences and crimes relating to children were not as researched as the existing literature suggests with a focus instead on mentally ill populations whose rates rose steadily in the last 30 years. After adjusting for the size of the incarcerated population, Nordic countries have conducted proportionately the most research. Our findings highlight that despite the presence of several research reporting guidelines, justice health abstracts still do not adequately describe the investigated populations. Our study offers new insights in the field of justice health. It has implications for promoting diversity in the selection of research participants. Men in prison appear to be under researched compared with women.