Bibliometric analysis of decision-making in healthcare management from 1998 to 2021

ABSTRACT

Healthcare management (HCM) has attracted significant attention from scholars and practitioners, and decision-making (DM) is always perceived as a crucial managerial function. This paper attempts to explore the trend and structure of DM research in the field of HCM (DM-HCM) by conducting a bibliometric analysis of publications from 1998 to 2021. A total of 581 documents covering all the available evidence are retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. First, a descriptive performance analysis is performed based on widely accepted bibliometric indicators, followed by identifying primary contributors in the research community. Then, a science mapping analysis is implemented to discover the structural connections among different research constituents using three visualization tools, namely, VoS viewer, CiteSpace, and Bibliometrix. The citation-related and co-authorship networks are analyzed to explore the intellectual structure of the bibliometric corpus. Moreover, the keyword co-occurrence, timeline view, and evolution analysis enrich the understanding of thematic clusters and identify the DM-HCM research focus. Finally, the main findings are summarized, and possible research directions are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometric analysis
• decision making
• healthcare management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duo Xu

Duo Xu holds a postgraduate diploma in Business Intelligence & Analytics from Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey. Her current research interests lie in data analysis and machine learning techniques in healthcare management. She holds a bachelor's degree in Management from The University of Manchester, Manchester.

Zeshui Xu

Zeshui Xu is a Professor at the Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu. He is currently the member of AE, EASA, IASCYS, Fellow of IEEE, IFSA, RSA, IET. He has authored 18 monographs published by Springer and published over 750 SCI/SSCI papers. His research interests include information fusion, group decision-making, and aggregation operators.