The tides of trust: A diachronic analysis of trust and the social contract in Canadian health journals

Public trust in Canadian medical leaders and institutions has significantly declined, impacting vaccine uptake and public health crisis responses. Mohamed’s project will investigate how foundational concepts of the “clinician social contract,” such as trust, professionalism, and accountability, have evolved in Canadian and American medical literature from 1900-2025.

Using large language model (LLM)-based tools, Mohamed’s team will digitize over a century of publications. From this, they will analyze the historical evolution of these concepts through advanced natural language processing. They will also correlate these changes with broader societal trends and policy shifts. Finally, they will create a public, searchable web interface, allowing researchers to independently explore historical word and phrase frequencies. This research will offer critical insights for rebuilding and maintaining public trust.