Mapping Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion research in medical education journals: An exploratory bibliometric analysis, 2018-2022

Abstract

Objectives: More medical schools are incorporating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) competencies into their institutional practices as the academic medicine community support programs and projects designed to build cultural humility in medical education, clinical care, and research. This study aims to identify and analyze items covering DEI-related topics published in medical education journals in the last five years (2018-2022). We performed a bibliometric analysis investigating the overall patterns of published articles, including the annual publication distribution, distribution by journal, and analysis of keywords. This approach aims to contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of DEI-related research in medical education.

Methods: We conducted a bibliometric analysis on articles published in a set of 56 core medical education journals indexed in Pubmed from 2018 to 2022. The searches were conducted in January 2023. To retrieve and gather citations for published articles, we used the Pubmed database. First, we used the NLM catalog to search and identify the subset of journals that are referenced in NCBI database records classified with “Education,Medical”[Mesh] OR "education"[MeSH Subheading] in the English language. Next, we developed and executed a comprehensive search to find articles that contained terms related to DEI; we used the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Competencies Across the Learning Continuum" ([LINK]https://store.aamc.org/downloadable/download/sample/sample_id/512/[/LINK]) as a guide to identifying the terminology to use in the search. We used Excel to aggregate, clean up and analyze the data,and VOSviewer software was utilized to create the topic analysis and visualization map.

Results: For the 2018-2022 time frame, 3,158 (out of 33,395, 9.5%) publications covering DEI topics were published in the selected journals. We will undertake term co-occurrence analysis on the keywords in the abstract as well as publishing trend analysis, source analysis, and overall dataset analysis as part of our study.

Conclusions: This poster will show an examination of articles about DEI subjects written in medical education journals over the previous five years and indexed in Pubmed. We will outline the characteristics of the top journals that published the research and topic trends of articles. The findings may support researchers and faculty in the health sciences disciplines when making decisions for developing a publication and research strategy. Researchers who seek DEI pathways to meet their promotion and tenure criteria will also benefit from understanding the results of this analysis.