The lexicon of sleep health: A natural language processing bibliometric analysis of the DEI-related terms

Overview & Synopsis

Objective. We assessed the representations of DEI-related terms in the sleep health literature as an indicator of the importance of (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) DEI-related terms for sleep health research and policies. Method. We performed a bibliometric analysis and a lexical network of these DEI-related terms in previously published literature. Results. Based on 4,047 abstracts, we found 105 out of 163 DEI-related terms (63.5%). A total of 2,822 (69.7%) articles had at least one DEI-related term. These articles had an average of 4.7 terms per article (sd: 5.7). Interestingly, the ratio of articles containing at least one DEI-related term has risen from 61.1% in 2014 to 73.9% in 2024. On the contrary, the number of DEI-related terms in each abstract remains constant over time. Conclusion.This bibliometric and lexical network study illustrates the difficulty of making research and promoting sleep health policies without DEI-related terms.