Department of Community Health Sciences, Section of Public Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
SirThe International Journal of Epidemiology1 has raised an important question on the shifting preferences in the use of race and ethnicity in scientific literature. The importance of recognizing these terms as two distinct concepts has been stressed.2 Chaturvedi argued that ethnicity is scientifically preferable to race. As the genetic variation between racial groups is small, categorization based on biological criteria is inaccurate and misleading in indicating variation in health and disease. Instead, a complex construct such as ethnicitywhich surprisingly is still not used in MedLine MeSH heading3is scientifically preferable.2,4 Studying ethnic variations in health, although socially sensitive, may help to determine aetiology, tackle inequalities, assess need, make public health plans and direct resource allocation.1,4 The lack of consistency in terminology and poor understanding of the concepts may, however, hamper progress in this field and make international collaboration more difficult.4 Ten years ago Sheldon and Parker reported that the use of ethnic groups and race as variables in the health literature from 1985 to 1990 had markedly increased but that studies on racism were rare.5 We have updated and expanded Sheldon and Parkers observations.
Search terms, as shown in the Table, were studied in PubMed listed articles and searched in all fields, publication types and languages, during 19662000. Based on publication dates, findings were categorized in 5-year periods. The number of articles in each category between 19962000 were divided by the number in 19661970 to yield a publication growth rate. The search terms were Ethnic groups, Ethnicity, Race and Racism. As the latter two terms are not MeSH headings, their MeSH equivalents Racial stocks and Prejudice were also studied. Some variables unrelated to ethnicity and race (Heart, Depression, Social, and Income) were selected as a reference to the general growth in publication.
Table 1 shows that while publication relating to all the search terms increased, ethnicity yielded 36.6 times more articles in 19962000, compared with 19661970, confirming the increasing scientific interest in this concept. In recent years, the number of appearances of Ethnic groups, Ethnicity, Race and even Racial stocks are still considerably higher than Racism and Prejudice, but the gap (in relative terms) has declined, which probably shows the increasing interest in racism. For the four reference search terms (Heart, Depression, Social, and Income) the growth ratios ranged from 2.4 times (for Heart) to 9.9 (for Income). Assuming this range as the background pattern, articles relevant to the MeSH term racial stocks have decreased disproportionately.
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References
1 Chaturvedi N. Ethnicity as an epidemiological determinantcrudely racist or crucially important? Int J Epidemiol 2001;30:92527.
2 Senior PA, Bhopal R. Ethnicity as a variable in epidemiological research. BMJ 1994;309:32730.
3 EntrenzPubMed. United states national library of medicine; NCBI | NLM | NIH; Department of Health & Human Services; Freedom of Information Act | Disclaimer; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=&DB=PubMed, (2829, March, 2002).
4 Bhopal R. Ethnicity and Race as Epidemiological Variables. London: Taylor and Francis, 2001, pp. 2140.
5 Sheldon TA, Parker H. Race and ethnicity in health research. J Public Health Med 1992;14:10410.[Abstract]