The GIC special. April in Implementation Science

by Jon Scaccia May 3, 2021

The GIC conference just kicked off, and it’s stupendous to be able to connect with implementation researchers and practitioners the world over. We wish we would have gotten a screenshot of the participant spread. To help the audience stay on top of recent articles, we did a quick synthesis of the last month of published implementation science research.

There have been 160 articles across the following four journals.

• Implementation Science
• Implementation Science Communications
• Frontiers in Public Health
• Implementation Research and Practice

We know there are many more places to find implementation research out there (and that GIRA is not yet indexed), but these four are a good place to start.

What we learned

Let’s start with a nice word cloud. By looking at word frequencies, we can see high-level themes over the past month. It’s not perfect, but can be a good overview.

What jumps out here is what jumps out in many places –> the biggest public health crisis in a generation. It’s likely that more COVID articles will be filtering in for the foreseeable future. And that’s okay! Science should be responsive.

The network plot provides a bit more context because it shows word associations. Here, the size of a circle corresponds to the frequency of the word, and the thickness of a line corresponds to a more frequently occurring relationship.

In addition to a big old “COVID 19 Pandemic” right in the middle, we also see a lot of terms that correspond with methods. If nothing else, implementation science is a methods-hungry science. (no complaints here, we just published a methods article.)

Topic Clusters. We then applied a clustering algorithm (LDA) to the abstracts, followed by extracting the keywords for each cluster. After tallying how frequently each topic occurred across all the 160 articles, we ended up with the following distribution.

Some super interesting stuff here. Obviously, COVID 19 takes the top spot, but we’re also seeing large clusters around hypertension and implementation strategies. Good to see there’s guidance continually coming out about how to put stuff into practice.

We also picked out the article that was most representative of each topic. We put these in a .pdf that can be downloaded below. If you want to make your reading broad, this is a good place to start.

April’s Representative ImpSci Articles

Interested in a specific topic like prescription drug overdose or certified nursing assistant? Don’t forget to check out our open search, right on PubTrawlr’s homepage.

PubTrawlr: making science accessible.