Kramer Brandon L, Lee Catherine
The Graph Foundation, New York, NY 10028.
Rutgers University, Department of Sociology, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Aug 26;122(34):e2401805122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2401805122. Epub 2025 Aug 19.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the rise of "diversity projects" across various educational and business contexts, but few studies have explored the meaning of diversity in biomedical research. In this paper, we employ a computationally driven matching technique to examine quantitative trends in the use of various forms of diversity and population terminology in a sample of nearly two million biomedical abstracts spanning a 30-y period. The curated dictionaries we leverage to detect these trends were formalized into open-source software that are publicly available for other researchers to use. Our analyses demonstrate marked growth in diversity, sex, gender, life course, and socioeconomic terms while terms relating to race and ethnicity largely plateaued or declined in usage, beginning in the mid-2000s. In addition, the use of national, continental, and subcontinental population labels increased dramatically over the same period. We also present logistic regression analyses to investigate what may be fueling the rise in use of diversity terminology. We argue that the use of diversity has grown to encompass concepts beyond its historical origins in race-based programs as it has in fields like higher education and employment. Despite some critics' claims regarding the role of diversity in research, we do not find evidence that its use signals retreat from or commitment to equity and inclusion efforts.
最近的学术研究强调了“多元化项目”在各种教育和商业背景下的兴起，但很少有研究探讨生物医学研究中多元化的含义。在本文中，我们采用一种计算驱动的匹配技术，来研究在一个涵盖30年时间、近200万篇生物医学摘要的样本中，各种形式的多元化和人群术语使用的量化趋势。我们用于检测这些趋势的经过整理的词典被整合到开源软件中，可供其他研究人员公开使用。我们的分析表明，自21世纪中叶以来，与多元化、性别、生命历程和社会经济相关的术语显著增加，而与种族和民族相关的术语在很大程度上趋于平稳或使用量下降。此外，在同一时期，国家、大陆和次大陆人群标签的使用急剧增加。我们还进行了逻辑回归分析，以探究推动多元化术语使用增加的因素。我们认为，多元化的使用已经扩展到超越其在基于种族的项目中的历史起源，如同在高等教育和就业等领域一样。尽管一些批评者对多元化在研究中的作用提出了质疑，但我们没有发现证据表明其使用意味着背离或致力于公平和包容的努力。
