Mapping Trends and Hot-spots of Virtual Simulation Research in Nursing: a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Background: Virtual simulation has been widely used in nursing education and nursing training. This study aims to characterize publications in terms of countries, institutions, journals, authors, and collaboration relationships, and analyze the trends and hot-spots of virtual simulation in nursing.Methods: Publications concerning virtual simulation in nursing were retrieved from Web of Science. Microsoft Excel 2010, VOSviewer, and Citespace were used to analyze the characteristics of this field. Results: We identified 611 papers between 1999 and 2021. The number of publications grew slowly until 2019, and got a sharp increase in 2020 and 2021. The USA, Canada and Australia were three key contributors to this field. Centennial College, University of Ottawa, and Ryerson University were three major institutions with a larger number of publications. Verkuyl M was the most productive and highest cited author. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, Nurse Education Today, Journal of Nursing Education were the three productive journals. "virtual patients," "nursing students," "clinical simulation," and "communication skills" were the frontier topics in recent years.Conclusion: Virtual patients simulated more clinical situations to train nursing students, developing more reliable and objective assessment methods to validate learning outcomes might be the recent and future hot-topics.