Scoping Review of HIV and the Black community in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Black community in Canada is disproportionately burdened by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). Factors at the downstream, midstream, and upstream levels contribute to this ongoing health challenge. The upstream (structural) factors are not well understood by policymakers and the Public Health Agency of Canada continues to request better research in this area. Examining the current research landscape on HIV and the Black community in Canada will identify the gaps and serve as the first step towards addressing them. Objective: The aim of this scoping review is to map existing health literature about HIV and the Black community in Canada and identify gaps that can be addressed in future research on this topic. This review also uses a scoping review methodology as a case to illustrate how this methodology can be used to identify literature gaps of a biomedical topic. Methods: This thesis follows the Joana Briggs Institute (JBI) Manual for Evidence Synthesis guidelines and was conducted through six major databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, EBSCO, and Google Scholar). Studies were systematically screened using the inclusion criteria. Data was analyzed and presented using pre-determined and subsequently developed outcome categories. Results: Our initial search produced 3060 abstracts. After applying our eligibility criteria and screening all abstracts and full-texts, we retained 67 articles. We added 11 studies from a recently published review on a similar topic, which resulted in a total of 78 literature sources for this study. HIV outcomes addressed in this review include prevalence, incidence, knowledge about HIV, behaviours related to transmission, access to care, barriers/facilitators to care, use of HIV care, engagement/retention in care, initiation/adherence to treatment, CD4 count, HIV-related stigma, intersectionality, HIV prevention, testing, and resilience. The majority of studies were conducted in Ontario (n = 65, ~83.3%) and were either cross-sectional (n = 26) or qualitative (n = 14) designs. The most common outcomes reported were behaviours related to HIV transmission (n = 17), HIV-related stigma (n = 15), and access to HIV care (n = 14). Conclusion: Overall, research gaps were observed at all three levels. Notable gaps include: data from provinces and territories outside of Ontario, incidence and prevalence data that can be pooled, comparisons of HIV knowledge and access to HIV care between Black and non-Black communities, information on HIV transmission through needles, and identifying structural solutions to addressing the HIV burden.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.107 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.039 | 0.057 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".