A Bibliometric Study of Global Trends in Social Medicine Publications on the Web of Science from 2002 to 2021

Bibliometric analysis by describing the state of publications and identifying key entities and emerging topics plays an important role in evaluating research. The aim of the paper is to study the global trends of scientific collaboration networks of researchers, organizations and countries and the co-occurrence of words in the field of social medicine in the database of Web of Science.

The method of investigation is bibliometric. The sample comprises 8494 publications in the area of social medicine between 2002 and 2021 in the Web of science database. The drawing of the scientific collaboration network of researchers, organisations and countries, and the analysis of the words network of co-occurrence, was made using the bibliometric software Vosviewer.

The publication process of social medicine documents in the target period is increasing. Research articles had the highest number of documents frequency and review articles received the most citations. The United States had the most published literature in this area, and most authors and organizations were from that country. The degrees of two countries, Canada and Australia, had the most citations per documents, and the five countries of South Africa, Portugal, Pakistan, India, and Iran were emerging players in this field. The network of words co-occurrence of social medicine in three groups was devoted to “preventive research in social medicine”, “social determinants of health” and “healthy lifestyle, nutrition and physical activity”. In terms of temporal occurrence, the five keywords public health, mental health, social medicine, meta-analysis and epidemiology were emerging subjects in the area of social medicine.

Understanding impact of non-clinical studies of social medicine on people’s lives has led to an increase in research in this field. In addition to the traditional role of developed countries, some developing countries are also new players in this field and seeking to develop their infrastructure in social medicine.