ArticlePLOS mental health2026
Who you are or what you have: Historical trends in identity-first and person-first language in books and news media.
Article in PLOS mental health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Whether people experiencing mental ill health or disability should be referred to using person-first (e.g., "person with autism") or identity-first (e.g., "autistic person") terminology is an ongoing subject of debate. The present study conducted the most comprehensive investigation to date of historical trends in the use of the two kinds of terms, evaluating the frequency of "X person/people" relative to "person/people with X" expressions for a collection of mental health, disability, and other conditions in Google Books (1980-2019) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-2025). Consistent with predictions, person-first language became more popular from 1980 onward, but this trend was counteracted by a more recent swing toward identity-first language, resulting in a curvilinear trend. Identity-first language was also more prevalent in singular than in plural expressions. Beyond these broad trends, there was substantial diversity in terminological preferences and trends across conditions. Implications are discussed.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.