BACKGROUND
Many countries around the world are currently threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic and nurses are facing increasing responsibilities and work demands related to infection control. To establish a developmental strategy for infection control, it is important to analyze, understand or visualize the accumulated data gathered from research in the field of nursing.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to identify the core keywords and topics of infection-related research over the past 40 years in nursing to better understand research trends in this field.
METHODS
This study was conducted in four steps: 1) selecting literature for analysis, 2) selecting the analysis units, 3) building a co-occurrence matrix and network, and 4) conducting text network analysis and topic modeling. A total of 4,854 articles published between 1978 and 2017 were retrieved from the Web of Science. Abstracts from these articles were extracted, and network analysis was conducted using the semantic network module.
RESULTS
As a result of centrality analysis using the word network extracted from the abstracts, ‘wound’, ‘injury’, ‘breast’, ‘dressing’, ‘temperature’, ‘drainage’, ‘diabetes’, ‘abscess’, and ‘cleaning’ were identified as the keywords with high values of degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and closeness centrality; hence, they were determined to be influential in the network. Ten topics were identified. The major topics were ‘PLWH’ (people living with HIV), ‘pregnancy’, and ‘STI’ (sexually transmitted infection).
CONCLUSIONS
Diverse infection research has been conducted on the topics of blood-borne infections, sexually transmitted infections, respiratory infections, urinary tract infections, and bacterial infections. STIs (including HIV), pregnancy, and bacterial infections have been the focus of particularly intense research by nursing researchers. More research on viral infections, urinary tract infections, immune topic, and hospital-acquired infections will be needed.
CLINICALTRIAL