BACKGROUND LGBTQ+ youth and adults use tobacco at a higher rate than the national average in the US. There is an urgent need for synthesizing published evidence to inform tobacco control policies to better serve this priority population. OBJECTIVE To develop algorithms to curate peer-reviewed articles that study LGBTQ individuals’ tobacco use and that are published at leading tobacco research journals from 2015 to early 2021, and to extract domain-specific textual entities from these articles. METHODS Our team built a tobacco research domain-specific semantic database to identify and extract data from articles that studied the LGBTQ+ population. We trained and employed a language model to extract named entities after learning patterns and relationships between words and their context in text. RESULTS Among 2,993 paper abstracts, 33 were identified as relevant to LGBTQ individuals’ tobacco use. We extracted the following information: different groups being studied, within the LGBTQ+ population; geographic locations; product types and characteristics; analytical methods; behavioral outcomes; and policies or interventions. CONCLUSIONS Evidence on the impacts of tobacco control policies on the LGBTQ+ population was lacking among the articles from leading tobacco research journals, and our tools have scale-up potentials to be applied to broader LGBTQ+ health literature.
BACKGROUND Identifying the existing brands in the e-cigarette market in the US is key to calculating the market share of different companies and their market power. OBJECTIVE To provide a database of e-cigarette brands to expedite e-cigarette market surveillance and help policymakers monitor market changes following regulatory actions. METHODS To facilitate the surveillance of the e-cigarette market and various product types that exist, we created a semantic database of e-cigarette brand names of 2020-2022 from multiple data sources, including: e-liquid brand data from online vape shops collected in 2021; disposable e-cigarette brand data from online vape shops collected in 2022; e-cigarette brand information from 2020 Nielsen Retail Scanner Data; a pre-existing list of e-cigarette brands on Wikipedia; self-reported brands from e-cigarette users in the US who participated in the 2020 International Tobacco Control Four-Country Smoking and Vaping (ITC 4CV) survey; and e-cigarette brands on Twitter from May 2021 to December 2021, published by Tang et al (2022). RESULTS In total, we identify 907 brands in our database that sell a variety of e-cigarette products through different channels (e.g., brick-and-mortar stores or online), such as e-liquids, pods/cartridges, disposables, devices, and starter kits. We also observe and document the top five e-cigarette brands by sales volume in counts in brick-and-mortar stores during 2020, the top five e-liquid brands by product frequency counts available in five popular online vape shops in 2021, as well as the top five e-cigarette brands by frequency counts in self-reported data from the ITC 4CV US 2020 survey. CONCLUSIONS Continuous monitoring of existing e-cigarette brands is crucial for e-cigarette market surveillance, and our semantic database can serve as a useful research tool to assess manufacturers’ marketing behaviors.
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