TBH- I wanted to start a newsletter or a podcast on health equity research because I wanted something that would force me into reading and reviewing peer-reviewed scholarship more often. In a more deliberate way. Because as it is, my MO is reading enough of the literature to put together a background section, writing the background section. And moving on. It’s tricky because I really do have a “stuff to read” folder on my Dropbox that has hundreds of articles in it.

It is funny, because I remember one of my grad-school professors saying that one habit he thought we should adopt is going to the library once a week or once a month to just review the printed publications in our area of research, making notes of articles and their findings. He did this in grad school and as an assistant professor. Of course- it’s a bit antiquated now. So many journals don’t have paper publications anymore. Many of us are working or doing this type of research from home. And if you’re me, you’re probably thinking through “what does it look like to capture this information so that its useful in the future?”.

Raul Pacheco-Vega has a blog post on carving time to read and keep up with the literature. Basically it comes down to AIC, a three-step method, where he reads the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. I think his opinion matters here because he is rather prolific (he published 12 papers in 2020 alone).

One could take it a step further, by putting all that information into a spreadsheet. If you pulled in key words, you could also have it be relatively searchable. A person who extracted the abstract, introduction, and conclusion for an article a day could build themselves a nice little database of 365 articles over the course of a year. If you did this with current literature, you’d be well on your way to developing the requisite information for literature reviews.

I’d love to do a podcast- but I think that is too much work for where I am in my life. The only one I know about is the Health Disparities Podcast– and it’s good in a way that I could never compete. Of course, it seems to be much more focused on practice (and maybe policy), whereas I am a lot more interested in the research. I guess what I am talking about is brief audio recordings of summarized health equity research? Is that a thing? It would be cool to feature guests that are health equity researchers and just have conversations about their work, what they see as the landscape, and future of their research given all the changes happening at the national level (with research funding, as well as changes in academia).

In any case, I recently learned about Notebook LM’s has a podcast feature. Notebook LM is an AI resources that is crazy good. You can upload a bunch of pdfs and have Notebook LM write a summary of it- which is very cool. Of course, I think you wouldn’t want to just let Notebook LM do that and hit publish. Only because we know that AI can hallucinate. And that would be embarrassing- to be outed as a person who didn’t bother to check if the generated summary was accurate? SAD.

Just playing around with the podcast feature, and I got THIS. I am starting to learn about the exposome ahead of a workshop I am taking at Columbia in July. So, I have been trying to read some of the research. I added three articles to my notebook and got a summary. But, the podcast- 18 minutes long. And its wild.

If I had time, I would evaluate the podcast text in light of the three articles. But, AI isn’t my main focus, so I probably won’t do that. But wow.