The FAIR database: facilitating access to public health research literature

Abstract

Objectives. In public health, access to research literature is critical to informing decision-making and to identify knowledge gaps. However, identifying relevant research is not a straightforward task since public health interventions are often complex, can have positive and negative impacts on health inequalities and are applied in diverse and rapidly evolving settings. We developed a “living” database of public health research literature to facilitate access to this information using Natural Language Processing tools. Materials and Methods. Classifiers were identified to identify the study design (eg, cohort study or clinical trial) and relationship to factors that may be relevant to inequalities using the PROGRESS-Plus classification scheme. Training data were obtained from existing MEDLINE labels and from a set of systematic reviews in which studies were annotated with PROGRESS-Plus categories. Results. Evaluation of the classifiers showed that the study type classifier achieved average precision and recall of 0.803 and 0.930, respectively. The PROGRESS-Plus classification proved more challenging with average precision and recall of 0.608 and 0.534. The FAIR database uses information provided by these classifiers to facilitate access to inequality-related public health literature. Discussion. Previous work on automation of evidence synthesis has focused on clinical areas rather than public health, despite the need being arguably greater. Conclusion. The development of the FAIR database demonstrates that it is possible to create a publicly accessible and regularly updated database of public health research literature focused on inequalities. The database is freely available from https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/eppi-vis/Fair.