Public health research is a multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach toward improving the health of the population. In recent years, there has been a significant investment in studying and collecting public health data; however, given the complexity of public health, it is not a trivial task to find related datasets to a given public health research problem. The Public Health Research includes topics such as

• Ageing and aged care
• Alcohol and other drugs
• Cancer
• Cardiovascular health
• Child and adolescent health
• Chronic disease
• Communicable and infectious diseases
• Crime and justice health
• Culturally and linguistically diverse communities
• Diabetes
• Environmental health
• Genetics
• Global public health
• Health economics
• Health services planning and management
• Health workforce
• Healthcare access and equity
• Immunisation
• Injuries and accidents
• Integrated care
• Legislation and regulation
• Maternal and infant health
• Mental health
• Nutrition
• Obesity
• Oral and dental health
• People with disabilities
• Physical activity
• Prescribing and medicines
• Primary care
• Respiratory disease
• Rural health
• Tobacco
• and many more …

In this working group, we aim to build a graph of different public health aspects and use this model to link public health data to research activities, research investments and research infrastructures.

For a researcher who works on chronic disease, he/she needs to spend a considerable effort in finding data related to other conceivable factors such as the overall well-being of patients, financial hardships, access to health services, physical activities, alcohol consumptions, and other social factors that can affect the community. The problem is finding datasets from all of the other disciplines; furthermore, once our researcher finds a related dataset, it is difficult to identify an expert who can assist with using the data. Such complexities make public health research expensive and inefficient.  This working group aims to assist researchers to find better data and identify domain experts in public health. Furthermore, our work would enable policymakers and practitioners to gain a better understanding of the landscape of public health research. 

Related RDA Groups and international collaborators 

We aim to leverage the work by the following groups:

• Scholix: This work leverages the RDA Scholix Working Group outcome and the data available via http://scholexplorer.openaire.eu
• Research Graph: This work adopts the Research Graph metamodel by RDA DDRI Working Group available via http://researchgraph.org/schema