Reported community engagement in health equity research published in high-impact medical journals: a scoping review

Objective: To assess reported community engagement in the design and conduct of health equity-focused articles published in high-impact journals.

Design: Scoping review follows guidance from the Joanna Briggs Institute and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews checklist.

Data sources: We selected the three highest-ranked journals from the 'Medicine-General and Internal' category including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) along with all journals under their family of subspecialty journals (JAMA Network, The Lancet Group and the NEJM Group). Ovid MEDLINE was searched between 1 January 2021 to 22 September 2022.

Eligibility criteria: We included health equity-focused articles and assessed for the reporting of community engagement at each stage of the research process.

Data extraction and synthesis: Two independent reviewers extracted data from articles that met the inclusionary criteria. Inter-rater reliability was assessed using Cohen's kappa to measure the agreement between two independent reviewers. Disagreements were adjudicated by a third independent reviewer.

Results: 7616 articles were screened, 626 (8.2%) met our inclusion criteria: 457 (3.8%) were published by the JAMA Network; 167 (2.4%) by The Lancet Group; and 2 (0.2%) by the NEJM group. Most articles were from USA (68.4%) and focused on adult populations (57.7%). The majority of the articles focused on the topic of race/ethnicity (n=176, 28.1%), socioeconomic status (n=114, 18.2%) or multiple equity topics (n=111, 17.7%). The use of community engagement approaches was reported in 97 (15.5%) articles, of which 13 articles (13.4%) reported engagement at all stages. The most common form of reported engagement was in the acknowledgement or additional contribution section (n=86, 88.7%).

Conclusions: Community engagement is infrequently reported in health equity-focused research published in high-impact medical journals.