An analysis of published study designs in PubMed prisoner health abstracts from 1963 to 2023: a text mining study

The challenging nature of studies with incarcerated populations and other offender groups can impede the conduct of research, particularly that involving complex study designs such as randomised control trials and clinical interventions. Providing an overview of study designs employed in this area can offer insights into this issue and how research quality may impact on health and justice outcomes. We used a rule-based approach to extract study designs from a sample of 34,481 PubMed abstracts related to epidemiological criminology published between 1963 and 2023. The results were compared against an accepted hierarchy of scientific evidence. We evaluated our method in a random sample of 100 PubMed abstracts. An F1-Score of 92.2