The Contributions of Criminology and Public Health to Gun Violence Research: Introducing Panoramic Systematic Reviews

• In Event: Policies & Interventions to Reduce Violent Crime

Abstract

Public health scholars often lament the paucity of research on gun violence, in part due to the relatively limited funding available from the federal health agency to study the issue. Yet, criminologists and social scientists have generated a significant body of research on gun violence. In this study, I compare gun violence research across disciplines and highlight areas of research overlooked by both public health scholars and criminologists. This presentation introduces a Panoramic Systematic Review (PSR) technique that combines topic modeling, network analysis, and other computational methods to comprehensively assess firearms research across social, medical, and other scientific fields. PSR leverages broad, cross-disciplinary searches of bibliographic databases and uses various modeling techniques to streamline both the filtering of irrelevant studies and the analysis of pertinent ones. On the methodological side, I demonstrate how computational tools can expand the scope of systematic reviews while reducing the burden of manual screening. Substantively, I present a detailed mapping of the scientific literature on firearms use, ownership, and policy—building a robust database that captures the full range of research on the use of firearms in society. The findings illustrate disciplinary silos of criminologists and public health scholars on gun violence research.

Author

• Jason Gravel, Temple University