Co- word Analysis of Women's Health Field of Study

Co-word analysis is a reliable method for discovering relationships and revealing the links between different scientific fields and illustrating the intellectual structure of a scientific discipline. This research aimed to study the intellectual structure of knowledge in women's health research using Co-word technique.

The research method of this study was descriptive-analytical which analyzed the content of texts with a scientometric approach. The research population includes 5626 records in the field of women's health on the PubMed website in the period 2010-2019.

Findings showed that in terms of frequency of descriptors of pregnancy and in terms of co-occurrence, two descriptors "pregnancy and maternal health" and "maternal health and child health" had the highest frequency in women's health research. Findings related to hierarchical clustering led to the formation of 10 clusters in this area, of which the "maternal and pregnancy health" cluster is strategically in the best position.

The present study showed that co- word analysis and clustering can help to understand the structure of thematic relationships in a field. The results of strategic chart analysis showed that the clusters of "health behavior", "menopause (hormone therapy)", "sexual behavior and AIDS", "maternal mental health", "health promotion policy" are among the emerging or declining clusters. The clusters of "effective factors in the incidence of gynecological diseases", "socio-economic factors and health status", "complications and pregnancy care", "health services" are among the central clusters, but have not been developed. Some issues related to women's health such as social health, spiritual health, working women, infertility, and abortion have received less attention.