Research Themes on the Quality of Public Services Exemplified By Healthcare Services — A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Abstract The growing competition for customers requires constant improvement of service quality, continuously raising the importance of this matter and the significance of the entire service sector. Essentially, service quality concerns not only the private but also the public sector. Service quality in the public sector has already been widely discussed in the literature. Among research themes in the frame of public service quality, the healthcare sector attracts particular attention from researchers. Therefore, this study aimed to identify research topics on the public service quality and healthcare quality discussed in the SCOPUS database from 2012 to 2022. A bibliometric technique and the VOSviewer software were used to analyse over 25 000 articles on public service and healthcare service published over ten years. As a result, a total of ten research themes were set up, five in the healthcare sector and five in the public sector, which were linked using keywords and presented on maps. The identified research themes demonstrate the most popular research directions and indicate research gaps related to the subject.