350 A half century of rural health research in the United States: the who, where, and what by bibliometrics

Abstract

Objectives/Goals: As a priority area in translational science, rural health research can benefit from informatics methods for conducting thematic and environment scans. This study demonstrates an efficient approach to gaining insights about the rural health research literature by automated bibliometrics analysis. Methods/Study Population: We developed an automated pipeline to retrieve the 1972–2023 PubMed publications indexed with the MeSH terms “Rural Health” and “United States”. The article metadata in XML format were downloaded and parsed, including title, year, journal, author institutions, and MeSH terms. Each institution address was augmented by Google Maps API to obtain the county and latitude/longitude coordinates. Summary statistics were computed for the publication years, journals, author departments, and locations. A topic network was generated from the frequent co-occurring MeSH terms. The institutions were linked to Rural-Urban Continuum Codes and labeled on a map to visualize their geographic distribution. Results/Anticipated Results: A total of 4564 articles on rural health were analyzed. Two salient peaks of publications were revealed, one around 1978 and the other around 1993. The top author departments include Family Medicine, Nursing, Pediatrics, and Epidemiology. The five leading institutions reside in Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, Iowa City, Seattle, and Atlanta. The geographic distribution shows few institutions that reside in deep rural areas are well published on rural health, although the most scholarly productive institutions do seem adjacent to some moderately rural pockets. The frequently identified topics pertain to age group, study design, and specific concepts such as health services accessibility. Discussion/Significance of Impact: The two publication peaks in history were likely linked to certain policy milestone or seminal publication. Primary care and epidemiology departments have been most active in rural health research. Of concern, the geographic distribution of authors suggests under-investment in rural institutions.