Every quarter, our staff posts any new publications from researchers who have utilized data through the National Center for Health Statistics Research Data Center (RDC) to our “What’s New?” and RDC User Publications webpages. These articles were either sent to us by the researchers or were found through searches on NCBI PubMed and Google Scholar. We thought that it may be interesting and instructive to construct a word cloud of the titles and abstracts from these articles to view major themes.

The size of the word in the wordcloud corresponds to its frequency in the titles and abstracts of RDC User articles that were published in 2012. Created using the wordcloud R package: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wordcloud/index.html

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the word that is largest in the word cloud, corresponding to the most frequent in the titles and abstracts is “health”. Words describing the surveys (e.g., “nutrition” and “examination”), study populations (e.g., “children” and “adults”), and the research topics (e.g., “cancer” and “insurance”) can also be quickly identified. Looking closer, we see words describing the restricted data that were accessed through the RDC. For example, the words “mortality” and “death” may be associated with restricted linked mortality files while “urban” and “rural” may be associated with the restricted geocode data.

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see what publications are on the horizon in 2013 and what the wordcloud for this year’s publications might look like in comparison.

Congratulations to all our researchers that published on their RDC projects in 2012. To researchers that are actively working on projects, we look forward to continuing to work with you in 2013 and seeing what publications result from your time at the RDC. And, to researchers interested in using the RDC, we hope to hear from you soon.