The Centre for Biomedical and Health Linguistics has developed and analyzed a 2 million word corpus of the public health literature consisting of the 2005 volumes of four major public health journals :

• The American Journal of Public Health
• BMC Public Health
• Journal of Public Health
• Public Health Nursing 

The raw data from that study can be downloaded as an Excel worksheet (PH_wordlist.xls). This worksheet lists the most commonly occurring 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7-word phrases. Additionally, the most commonly occurring words are listed according to frequency and grouped according to whether they occur in the GSL (2,000 most common English words), the Academic Word List, or whether they are on neither of these lists and therefore likely to hold a special meaning within public health.

This study was published as :

Millar N, Budgell B. The language of public health – a corpus based analysis. The Journal of Public Health 2008;16(5):369-374.