Finding what is inaccessible: Antimicrobial resistance language use among the One Health domains

Authors: WIND, LAUREN - Virginia Tech; BRIGANTI, JONATHAN - Virginia Tech; BROWN, ANNE - Virginia Tech; NEHER, TIMOTHY - Iowa State University; DAVIS, MEGHAN - Johns Hopkins University; Durso, Lisa; SPICER, TANNER - Virginia Tech; LANSING, STEPHANIE - University Of Maryland

Submitted to: Antibiotics
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/31/2021
Publication Date: 4/3/2021
Citation: Wind, L., Briganti, J., Brown, A.M., Neher, T.P., Davis, M.F., Durso, L.M., Spicer, T., Lansing, S. 2021. Finding what is inaccessible: Antimicrobial resistance language use among the One Health domains. Antibiotics. 10:385. https://doi.org/10.3390/antibiotics10040385.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/antibiotics10040385

Interpretive Summary: Antimicrobial resistance is an important threat to the health humans, animals, and the environment. For humans and animals, it means that infectious diseases that used to be easily treated are no longer responding to the drugs that are available. For the environment, it means that important natural processes, like nutrient cycling, might be impacted. In order to solve this important problem, people who work in all three areas – human health, animal health, and environmental health, termed “One Health” – must work together to find solutions. One of the challenges to working in a collaborative way is thought to be that the three groups talk and write about antimicrobial resistance in different ways. The same word means different things, depending on what group is using the term, and there are different underlying ways that people think, talk, and write about the issue. In this study we used two computer-assisted techniques to investigate these language differences, by looking at language use within each group, and by comparing language use across groups. Specifically, we examined open access publications, and a set of key terms to identify papers, and then a technique called natural language processing to tally how often key terms were used. Overall the number of articles related to antimicrobial resistance in our search group increased five-fold between 1990 and 2019. In our data set, the term “antibiotic resistance” was used sixteen times more than the term “antimicrobial resistance”. The differences we observed in language use across the three groups potentially weakens the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research. We suggest the following for authors publishing AMR-related research within the One Health context: (1) increase title/abstract searchability by including both antimicrobial and antibiotic resistance related search terms; (2) include “One Health” in the title/abstract; and (3) prioritize open-access publication.

Technical Abstract: The specific language used in literature on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is hypothesized to be dissimilar across the One Health domains (human, animal, and environment); however, this has yet to be investigated and confirmed. Incongruent key terms and language use among researchers can lead to miscommunication and inefficient progress on the interdisciplinary issues surrounding AMR. To investigate the reach of this language problem and expand communication across disciplinary boundaries, we used a combination of text data mining and natural language processing techniques on 20,000 open-access articles related to AMR and One Health from the European PubMed Collection published between 1990 and 2019. Evaluating AMR key term frequency when using consistent search term strings showed nuanced distinction in AMR language used within each domain (agriculture, human health, environment) and incongruent usage across domains, with significant differences in key term usage frequencies when articles were grouped by sub-specialties (2-way ANOVA; p < 0.001). Overall, the number of articles related to AMR in the One Health domains increased by a factor of five from 1990 (n=33,362 articles) to 2019 (n=165,516 articles). Over this same period, “antibiotic resistance” and the associated acronym (“AR”) were used 16 times more than “antimicrobial resistance” and the associated acronym (“AMR”) in the 20,000 analyzed articles. The discord of language use in the One Health field potentially weakens the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research by creating an accessibility problem for researchers using search engines. We suggest the following for authors publishing AMR-related research within the One Health context: (1) increase title/abstract searchability by including both antimicrobial and antibiotic resistance related search terms; (2) include “One Health” in the title/abstract; and (3) prioritize open-access publication.