title: Trends in the investigation of social determinants of health: selected themes and methods.
abstract: We analyze bibliometric trends of topics relevant to the epidemiologic research of social determinants of health. A search of the PubMed database, covering the period 1985-2007, was performed for the topics: socioeconomic factors, sex, race/ethnicity, discrimination/prejudice, social capital/support, lifecourse, income inequality, stress, behavioral research, contextual effects, residential segregation, multilevel modeling, regression based indices to measure inequalities, and structural equation modeling/causal diagrams/path analysis. The absolute, but not the relative, frequency of publications increased for all themes. Total publications in PubMed increased 2.3 times, while the subsets of epidemiology/public health and social epidemiologic themes/methods increased by factors of 5.3 and 5.2, respectively. Only multilevel and contextual analyses had a growth over and above that observed for epidemiology/public health. We conclude that there is clearly room for wider use of established techniques, and for new methods to emerge when they satisfy theoretical needs.
authors.affiliation: Faculdade de Odontologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brasil. roger.keller@ufrgs.br
authors.forename: Roger Keller
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Celeste
authors.forename: João Luiz
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Bastos
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Faerstein
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005006:Ethnicity; D006801:Humans; D039781:PubMed; D012106:Research / Q000639:trends*; D012737:Sex Factors; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors