Establishing Metrics to Evaluate Diversity in PubMed Central

Objectives: The primary objective of this research project is to measure and evaluate the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) of journal citations within PubMed Central. The process of conducting this research project involved engaging with multiple stakeholder perspectives, completing literature review and technical analysis, and identifying metadata relevant to DEIA. Throughout the project, we hypothesized that DEIA was inadequately represented in existing database metadata schemas.

Methods: Diversity metrics were culled from cross-disciplinary literature reviews and consultation with stakeholders. The researchers developed metrics on all possible levels of analysis. The authors compiled a comprehensive list of all DEIA-related metrics uncovered in the literature review. Considering the broad scope of DEIA, a large majority of identified journal diversity metrics are not analyzable via current metadata within the database. Thus, the preliminary results of this study will focus on the feasibility of DEIA-related bibliometric analysis of PubMed Central.

Results: There are many potential DEIA-related metrics at four levels of analysis (author, article, journal, publisher). Given the current metadata availability and ethical considerations the feasibility and number of DEIA-related metrics that PubMed Central can assess is limited. Because DEIA-related information is not standardized within metadata elements, Natural Language Processing can be used to clean data to enable analysis.

Conclusions: We have identified DEIA bibliometric analyses that are possible given the current metadata structures in PMC. We also hope to convey the following generalizable takeaways identified during our research process: Project scoping, ethical considerations, technical considerations, and consultations with stakeholders.