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

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.