Global Research Trends in Community-Based Strategies for Reducing Risky Alcohol Consumption and Promoting Health

TL;DR

This study maps global research trends in community-based strategies to reduce risky alcohol consumption and promote health, showing how these efforts are integrated into public health frameworks.

Contribution

The study identifies thematic areas and geographic shifts in alcohol prevention research, offering insights for equitable policy and practice.

Findings

Community-based alcohol prevention is expanding and is increasingly led by low- and middle-income countries.

Core themes include youth, maternal and child health, and integration with health promotion and prevention domains.

The thematic map reveals a mature focus on adolescents and pregnancy, with emerging links to family planning.

Abstract

Public health relevance—How does this work relate to a public health issue?

Hazardous alcohol use is a major global risk factor, and this study maps how community-based strategies to reduce risky drinking have developed across countries, populations, and settings.

By positioning alcohol-focused programs within broader health-promotion and prevention domains, the study shows how community interventions are embedded in mainstream public health practice.

Public health significance—Why is this work of significance to public health?

The analysis identifies core thematic areas, especially youth and maternal and child health platforms, that currently drive community-based alcohol drinking prevention and are critical targets for public health action.

It documents a shift from high-income dominance toward increasing contributions from low- and middle-income countries, highlighting both growing capacity and persistent inequities in alcohol-prevention research.

Public health implications—What are the key implications or messages for practitioners, policy makers and/or researchers in public health?

Practitioners and policymakers can use these findings to prioritize community-based alcohol drinking prevention strategies that align with established health promotion, primary prevention, and maternal and child health frameworks.

Researchers are directed toward understudied regions, populations, and delivery models, supporting more equitable, evidence-informed alcohol drinking policies and stronger integration of evaluation data into public health monitoring.

The aim of this study was to map global research on community-based strategies to reduce risky alcohol consumption and promote health, aiming to clarify growth, leading contributors, thematic structure, and integration with public-health frameworks. Using a PubMed corpus, we analyzed production, authorship, and collaboration indicators, built a thematic map (centrality/density) to identify core topics, and applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis to assess conceptual proximity between alcohol-specific and broader prevention domains. The dataset comprised 2607 documents across 916 sources, with output led by the USA, with substantial contributions from Australia, Canada, the UK, and rising activity in sub-Saharan Africa. The thematic map showed a mature core centered on adolescents and pregnancy, cross-cutting foundations in health education and sexual behavior with substance-related disorders, measurement-oriented niches at the periphery, and emerging work linking family planning. The Multiple Correspondence Analysis positioned alcohol-prevention terms close to health promotion, primary prevention, and epidemiology, with maternal–child health bridging community programs and clinical prevention. Overall, community-based alcohol prevention is expanding, globally distributed, and embedded in mainstream public-health practice. Limitations include the absence of citation data in PubMed, and future work should integrate citation-enabled databases and compare patterns across income groups.

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