An Analysis of Medical Ethics Research in the International Arena

Co-word analysis is a reliable way of discovering relationships and revealing links between different disciplines and illustrating the intellectual structure of a discipline. This study attempts to study the intellectual structure of knowledge in medical ethics research using the Co-word analysis technique.

This research is a descriptive-analytical study that analyzes the content of texts with a scientometric approach. The study population consisted of 3296 medical ethics records in the Web of Science database during the period 1998-2018.

Findings showed that in terms of frequency, keywords of bioethics and informed consent were more abundant in medical ethics research. The hierarchical clustering findings led to the formation of 9 clusters in which the clusters of "medical futility", "informed consent" and "medical education with clinical ethics approach" were in the best position. Ethical Considerations: Honesty and trustworthiness in the selection of articles have been reported and citations to the texts have been observed.

The present study showed that Co-Word analysis and clustering can help to understand the structure of the subject relationships in one field. Results of strategic graph analysis showed that "informed consent", "medical education with ethical approach" and "medical futility" is the central clusters. In contrast to the four clusters, "physician-patient relationship", "ethics in medical research", "medical profession and conscientiousness" and "easy death" are emerging or disappearing clusters. Research is lacking in some topics such as abortion, simulation, sterilization and etc.