Analysis of Research of Medical Sociology Field in the International Arena

With graphical mapping of an academic field, more accurate way to identify the branches of human knowledge and transform the concept of abstraction to concrete objectives. This study endeavored to map the related articles of medical sociology.

The descriptive-analytical study analyzed the content of the texts with a scientometrics approach. The sample is all international scientific articles in the field of medical sociology, indexed in PubMed database from 1945-2018. UCINET and NetDraw were used to analyze the data and draw the scientific map.

The results showed that according to the indicators of centrality, the topic of "physician-patient relationship" was ranked first in all three types of centrality. According to the indicators of closeness and degree, the prominent value is given to the thematic categories of "health attitude" and "social and economic factors". Besides, the topic of "medical care delivery" had the most prominent value in terms of betweenness centrality.

The social network analysis indexes are effective in analyzing scientific maps. The formed thematic structure and the relationship between them showed the interdisciplinary nature of the field of medical sociology. Some important issues related to medical sociology, such as social parameters affecting treatment and rehabilitation, epidemiological research, and healthy behavior, have received less attention