Mapping the Scientific Research on Healthcare Workers’ Occupational Health: A Bibliometric and Social Network Analysis

Bingke Zhu, Hao Fan, Bingbing Xie, Ran Su, Chaofeng Zhou and Jianping He
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Bingke Zhu: School of Public Health and Management, School of Humanities and Social Science, Hubei University of Medicine, Shiyan 442000, China
Hao Fan: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430000, China
Bingbing Xie: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430000, China
Ran Su: School of Public Health and Management, School of Humanities and Social Science, Hubei University of Medicine, Shiyan 442000, China
Chaofeng Zhou: School of Public Health and Management, School of Humanities and Social Science, Hubei University of Medicine, Shiyan 442000, China
Jianping He: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430000, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-22

Abstract: In the last few years, the occupational health (OH) of healthcare workers (HCWs) has been shown increasing concern by both health departments and researchers. This study aims to provide academics with quantitative and qualitative analysis of healthcare workers’ occupational health (HCWs+OH) field in a joint way. Based on 402 papers published from 1992 to 2019, we adopted the approaches of bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA) to map and quantify publication years, research area distribution, international collaboration, keyword co-occurrence frequency, hierarchical clustering, highly cited articles and cluster timeline visualization. In view of the results, several hotspot clusters were identified, namely: physical injuries, workplace, mental health; occupational hazards and diseases, infectious factors; community health workers and occupational exposure. As for citations, we employed document co-citation analysis to detect trends and identify seven clusters, namely tuberculosis (TB), strength training, influenza, healthcare worker (HCW), occupational exposure, epidemiology and psychological. With the visualization of cluster timeline, we detected that the earliest research cluster was occupational exposure, then followed by epidemiology and psychological; however, TB, strength training and influenza appeared to gain more attention in recent years. These findings are presumed to offer researchers, public health practitioners a comprehensive understanding of HCWs+OH research.

Keywords: healthcare workers; occupational health; bibliometric; SNA; occupational exposure; physical injuries; infectious diseases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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