Knowledge Structure and Evolution of Elderly Care Services: A Visualized Analysis

Abstract

The irreversible global aging trend brings a rapid growth in demand for elderly care services, which also promotes the rapid development of relevant research, but there lacks a holistic review on it. This paper aims to conduct an analysis to reveal research hotspots and future directions with a visual display. The "Web of Science Core Collection" database is searched, and CiteSpace software is used to sort out the characteristics of related research and draw a scientific map of keywords clustering. Elderly care services research has obtained continuous attention for a long time and rapidly developed since 2017. Based on the keywords clustering, focuses of the research can be divided into five categories, namely care goals, basic pension models, innovation and provision of elderly services, as well as the demands of special elderly groups. It can be seen from keywords with strong burst that research frontiers contain care goal, endowment service institutions, frailty of the elderly, work of supply entities, and service for the aged in China. This paper proposes three directions for future research, including a multidimensional dynamic measurement of elders' demands, the interaction between elders' behavioral characteristics and services for them, and an integrated pension model combine actual contexts and novel technologies.