Research status and hotspots of economic evaluation in nursing by co-word clustering analysis

Abstract

Objective The aim of this study is to discover research status and hotspots of economic evaluation (EE) in nursing area using co-word cluster analysis. Methods Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term “cost–benefit analysis” was searched in PubMed and nursing journals were limited by the function of filter. The information of author, country, year, journal, and keywords of collected paper was extracted and exported to Bicomb 2.0 system, where high-frequency terms and other data could be further mined. SPSS 19.0 was used for cluster analysis to generate dendrogram. Results In all, 3,020 articles were found and 10,573 MeSH terms were detected; among them, 1,909 were MeSH major topics and generated 42 high-frequency terms. The consequence of dendrogram showed seven clusters, representing seven research hotspots: skin administration, infection prevention, education program, nurse education and management, EE research, neoplasm patient, and extension of nurse function. Conclusions Nursing EE research involved multiple aspects in nursing area, which is an important indicator for decision-making. Although the number of papers is increasing, the quality of study is not promising. Therefore, further study may be required to detect nurses’ knowledge of economic analysis method and their attitude to apply it into nursing research. More nursing economics course could carry out in nursing school or hospitals.