Analysis and Visualization of Published Literature on Healthcare Services Research from 2011 to 2022: a Bibliometric and Network Analysis

Healthcare services are one of the major public issues facing the world and have become a research hotspot in recent years. This paper provides a review and quantitative analysis of the literature related to healthcare services to sort out the research trends and hotspots in this field. This paper used bibliometric analysis to search keywords in the Web of Science database in TITLE-ABS-KEY format. After screening, the final 4188 articles from 2011 to 2022 were collated, and co-citation analysis was performed using VOSviewer literature visualization analysis software. The global healthcare services literature has grown steadily year after year. Health Care Sciences & Services (9.5%) and General & Internal Medicine (8.7%) were the most common areas of research, with the United States (N=1016) accounting for the largest share of research. “BMC Health Services Research” is the most active journal (N=149). Healthcare services are one of the current research focuses in the field of healthcare institutions. In the future, further research into assistive technologies and tools for healthcare services, such as the Internet of Things, cloud services, and big data analytics will be investigated. In addition, research on healthcare services focusing on special needs populations, especially the elderly, is a hotspot for future research, broadening the boundaries of research and having practical value.