Announcements

Congratulations to our postdoctoral fellow Hayoung Donnelly, PhD, on receiving the 2024 AMIA Inclusive Language Award at this year's American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) symposium for her project entitled, "Global Disparities in Suicide Research Using Natural Language Processing." The AMIA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee noted, "This study showcases exemplary practices in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion through scholarly communications in biomedical informatics." A brief description of the project is below:

Traditional research syntheses (e.g., manual systematic and scoping reviews) have been limited in providing comprehensive historical analyses due to the large volume of publications. This study addresses research gaps between Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) and High-Income Countries (HICs) using Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to answer two key questions: “What proportion of suicide ideation articles focus on LMICs versus HICs?” and “What topics have been explored in LMIC research?” We gathered 15,708 articles via the PubMed API and identified 159 countries using named entity recognition. Only 27.2% of the articles focused on LMICs. Five distinct topics emerged (e.g., military/veterans, assessment/evaluation), with their trends varying over time. This study contributes to global mental health equity by providing evidence in research disparities and thematic patterns in LMIC-focused studies.

Donnelly, H. K., Mowery, D. L., Brown, G. K., & Steinberg, M. B. (2024, November). Global Disparities in Suicide Research Using Natural Language Processing [Poster]. American Medical Informatics Association 2024 Annual Symposium, San Francisco, CA.