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

We assessed the representations of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related terms in the sleep health literature as an indicator of the importance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related terms for sleep health research and policies.

We performed a bibliometric analysis and a lexical network of these Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related terms in previously published literature.

Based on 4047 abstracts, we found 105 out of 163 DEI-related terms (63.5%). A total of 2822 (69.7%) articles had at least one Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-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 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related terms in each abstract remains constant over time.

This bibliometric and lexical network study illustrates the difficulty of making research and promoting sleep health policies without Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related terms.