Scientometric analysis of researches in the field of health education to patients in PabMed database (1964- 2014)

Educating health to patients is a patient-centered process based on needs expressed by both the physician and the patient in order to make a collaborative and conscious decision over the disease. Surveying and analyzing the research fields in this area and discovering the relationships between the expressions used in this paper can provide researchers and scholars with useful information. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the article contents related to the area of health education for the patients through thematic mapping and hierarchical clustering methods. The current research is of descriptive-analytical type and has dealt with analyzing texts’ contents with a hierarchical clustering approach. Searching the phrase “Health Education” and filtering the search with “Patient Education” as well as the “Major Topics” helped us extract the entire data on PubMed database (1964 to 2014). Analysis and clustering of data were done using software such as SPSS20 and Ravar PreMap. Findings: Producing scientific articles on health education for the patients has showed an increasing trend. Regarding the hierarchical clustering, noted thematic areas included health education, drug consumption pathology, nurses, communication skills, health promotional behaviors, adaptability and mental health, health literacy, and preventive behaviors. The thematic clusters formed have structural relationships as they exploit similarity measurement method and the distance between descriptors. The majority of researchers noticed psychological and therapeutic aspects in health education area.