Synonym-based word frequency analysis to support the development and presentation of a public health quality improvement taxonomy in an online exchange.

Word frequency analysis has not been fully explored as an input to public health taxonomy development. We used document analysis, expert review, and user-centered design to develop a taxonomy of public health quality improvement concepts for an online exchange of quality improvement work (www.phqix.org). Online entries were made searchable using a faceted search approach. To present the most relevant facets to users, we analyzed 334 published public health quality improvement documents using word frequency analysis to identify the most prevalent clusters of word meanings. We reviewed the highest-weighted concepts and identified their relationships to quality improvement details in our taxonomy. The meanings were mapped to items in our taxonomy, and presented in order of their weighted percentages in the data. Using this combination of methods, we developed and sorted concepts in the faceted search presentation so that relevant search criteria were accessible to users of the online exchange. Word frequency analysis may be a useful method to incorporate in other taxonomy development and presentation when relevant data is available.