BACKGROUND
The telemedicine has become an advancing phenomenon in the center-patients healthcare system of modern societies, but its application in nursing research has faced many challenges. Over the past 15 years, more and more researches on telemedicine nursing have been introduced or is in progress. However, the actual trends and visibility of the existing research publication landscape of telemedicine nursing to comprehensively quantify are still scarce.
OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to conduct a bibliographic-bibliometric analysis to visualize and reveal research hotspots and promising future trends in telemedicine nursing.
METHODS
All published studies on telemedicine nursing research in English between 2003 and 2019 were retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded of the Web of Science. The necessary information, such as annual output, countries, institutions, journals, authors, citations, references, and keywords, was extracted from the abstract of publications. Excel, VOSviewer, and bibliometric.com were utilized to perform a bibliographic-bibliometric analysis.
RESULTS
A total of 640 articles obtained during initial screening, and 368 articles after manual screening were eligible. The annual number of articles increased every year, with a relatively significant growth after 2014. Of the top 5 productive countries, the USA issued the most articles in this field, accounting for 48.64%(179/368), followed by Australia(8.15%,30/368) and Sweden(6.25%,23/368), and China was the only developing country(4.08%,15/368). The main categories of diseases related to telemedicine nursing were cardiovascular disease (24.43%,55/211 ) with heart failure accounting for 54.55% (30/55), cancer (14.03%,31/221),diabetes (14.03%,31/221) and mental health(13.57%,30/221).And the publications of disease research on mHealth accounted for 13.86% (51/368),primarily focused on technology (19.61%,10/51), quality-of-life (15.69%,8/51) and self-management (19.61%,10/51) in 2018.
CONCLUSIONS
The mHealth has become the mainstream in telemedicine nursing research on disease care, focusing on technology,quality-of-life, and self-management since 2018. Future studies could focus on expanding disease area range in use of telemedicine nursing, exploring the theories, and tailoring mHealth interventions based on the patient-center needs.