Background Epidemiological criminology refers to health issues affecting incarcerated and nonincarcerated offender populations, a group recognized as being challenging to conduct research with. Notwithstanding this, an urgent need exists for new knowledge and interventions to improve heath, justice, and social outcomes for this marginalized population. Objective To better understand research outputs in the field of epidemiological criminology, we examined the lead author’s affiliation by analyzing peer-reviewed published outputs to determine countries and organizations (eg, universities, governmental and nongovernmental organizations) responsible for peer-reviewed publications. Methods We used a semiautomated approach to examine the first-author affiliations of 23,904 PubMed epidemiological studies related to incarcerated and offender populations published in English between 1946 and 2021. We also mapped research outputs to the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index to better understand whether there was a relationship between research outputs and the overall standard of a country’s justice system. Results Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark) had the highest research outputs proportional to their incarcerated population, followed by Australia. University-affiliated first authors comprised 73.3% of published articles, with the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) being the most published, followed by the University of New South Wales (Australia). Government-affiliated first authors were on 8.9% of published outputs, and prison-affiliated groups were on 1%. Countries with the lowest research outputs also had the lowest scores on the Rule of Law Index. Conclusions This study provides important information on who is publishing research in the epidemiological criminology field. This has implications for promoting research diversity, independence, funding equity, and partnerships between universities and government departments that control access to incarcerated and offending populations.

BACKGROUND The area of epidemiological criminology studies the intersection between the public health and justice systems focusing on prevalent health issues that affect offending and incarcerated populations. Given the growth in this field in recent years, it is important to understand and assess gaps between research outputs and priorities identified from prisoner health stakeholders. OBJECTIVE Examine published research outputs in epidemiological criminology to assess gaps between published outputs and current research priorities identified by prison stakeholders. METHODS Text mining study. A rule-based method was applied to 23,904 PubMed epidemiological criminology abstracts to extract the study determinants and outcomes (i.e., “themes”). These were mapped against research priorities identified by Australian prison stakeholders to assess differences from research outputs. The income level for the affiliation country of the first authors was also identified to compare the ranking of research priorities in income country groups. RESULTS On an evaluation set of 100 abstracts, the identification of themes returned an F1-Score of 90.0% indicating reliable performance. More than 50% of articles had at least one extracted theme; the most common was substance use (12.9%) followed by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (12.6%). Infectious diseases (24.9%) was the most common research priority category, followed by mental health (24.0%) and alcohol and other drug use (20.5%). A comparison between the extracted themes and the stakeholder priorities showed an alignment for mental health, infectious diseases and alcohol and other drug use. While behaviour and juvenile related themes were common, they did not feature as prison priorities. Most research derived was from high income countries (85.3%) while countries with the lowest income status focused half of their research on infectious diseases (51.6%). CONCLUSIONS The frequency of investigated themes may reflect historical developments concerning disease prevalence, treatment advances, and social understandings of illness and incarcerated populations. Differences between income status groups are likely to be explained by local health priorities and immediate health risks. Notable gaps between stakeholder research priorities and research outputs concerned themes more focused on social factors and systems and may reflect publication bias or self-publication-selection highlighting the need for further research on prison health services and social determinants of health.