Bibliometric Review of the Knowledge Base on Healthcare Management for Sustainability, 1994–2018

In response to the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), health care organizations throughout the world have adopted management initiatives designed to increase their sustainability. This review of research used bibliometric methods to analyze a dataset comprised of 477 documents extracted from the Scopus database. The review sought to document research on sustainable healthcare management (SHM) that has accumulated over the past 25 years. Results indicated that the intellectual structure of this body of knowledge is comprised of three schools of thought: (1) sustainable change in health care services, (2) innovations in managing health care operations, and (3) prioritizing and allocating resources for sustainability. The review also highlighted the recent topical focus of research in this literature. Key topics were linked to organization and management of health care services, quality of patient care, and sustainability of health care delivery.

Healthcare marketing: A review of the literature based on citation analysis

This study identifies the principal sources of knowledge in the healthcare marketing field based on the most prolific and influential journals and authors, drawing on a sample of 1,950 articles published in 11 journals from 1987 to 2016. The three most influential journals are the International Journal of Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Marketing, the International Journal of Healthcare Management, and the Academy of Health Care Management Journal. Health Marketing Quarterly is another highly influential and prolific journal. The most prolific authors are Brian Smith, David Loudon, Donald Self, and Robert Stevens. The most influential authors, on the basis of fractional citations, are Philip Brown, Renuka Garg, and Jayesh Aagja. This is the first study to systematically review the burgeoning body of healthcare marketing literature with the aim of mapping the research that has been undertaken in this area. This is by far the most comprehensive review on this topic to date.

Mapping the Intellectual Structure of the Big Data Research in the IS Discipline

Big data (BD) is one of the emerging topics in the field of information systems. This article utilized citation and co-citation analysis to explore research articles in the field of BD to examine the scientific development in the area. The research data was retrieved from the WOS database from the period between 2005 and June 2016, which consists of 366 articles. In the citation analysis, this article relies on the degree centrality and betweenness centrality for identifying 38 important papers in BD. In the co-citation analysis, a principal component factor analysis of the co-citation matrix is employed for identifying six major research themes: foundations, BD applications, techniques and technologies, challenges, adoption and impacts and literature review. This literature review is one of the first studies to examine the knowledge structure of BD research in the information systems discipline by using evidence-based analysis methods. Recommendations for future research directions in BD are provided based on the analysis and results of this study.

Influential journals in health research: a bibliometric study

Background

There is a wide range of intellectual work written about health research, which has been shaped by the evolution of diseases. This study aims to identify the leading journals over the last 25 years (1990–2014) according to a wide range of bibliometric indicators.

Methods

The study develops a bibliometric overview of all the journals that are currently indexed in Web of Science (WoS) database in any of the four categories connected to health research. The work classifies health research in nine subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Health Management and Economics, Health Promotion and Health Behavior, Epidemiology, Health Policy and Services, Medicine, Health Informatics, Engineering and Technology, and Primary Care.

Results

The results indicate a wide dispersion between categories being the American Journal of Epidemiology, Environmental Health Perspectives, American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science & Medicine, the journals that have received the highest number of citations over the last 25 years. According to other indicators such as the h-index and the citations per paper, some other journals such as the Annual Review of Public Health and Medical Care, obtain better results which show the wide diversity and profiles of outlets available in the scientific community. The results are grouped and studied according to the nine subfields in order to identify the leading journals in each specific sub discipline of health.

Conclusions

The work identifies the leading journals in health research through a bibliometric approach. The analysis shows a deep overview of the results of health journals. It is worth noting that many journals have entered the WoS database during the last years, in many cases to fill some specific niche that has emerged in the literature, although the most popular ones have been in the database for a long time.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12992-016-0186-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.