The Centre for Biomedical and Health Linguistics has developed a corpus of midwifery and perinatal care. This corpus of over one million words comprises articles from the 2005 volumes of 5 major journals in the field:

A manuscript has been published in the Journal of the Japan Academy of Midwifery 2010; 24(1): pp 1-10. The raw data from that study - keywords and n-grams are listed on the attached spreadsheets and may be of assistance in the development of learning and assessment resources.

All of our corpora were created with the intention of improving communicative competence in the languages of biomedicine and health. Thus, one important application is the use of the corpora as sources of exemplars for authors. The midwifery corpus is indeed searchable, so that authors can input a search term, such as "birth", and the system will output lists of sentences demonstrating authentic use of the term. Please try our search engine. This tool will soon be expanded to cover all of our corpora.