International publication trends and collaboration performance of China in healthcare science and services research

Abstract

Background: In recent years, China's healthcare reforms and related studies have drawn particular global attention. The main objective of this study is to evaluate quantitatively the publication trends and collaboration performance of China in healthcare science and services (HSS) research.

Methods: Scientometric methods and visualization technology were used to survey the growth and development trends of HSS research based on the Web of Science publications during the past 15 years.

Results: China's international publications on HSS research increased rapidly compared to those of the global HSS and Chinese scientific studies. Growth trends indicate that collaboration among countries, institutions and authors has also increased. China's leading partners were all developed countries, such as the US, the UK, Australia and Canada, which have contributed to the majority of the joint publications. The academic impact of publications involving partners from European and American countries was relatively higher than those involving partners from Asian countries. Prominent institutions were universities that could be primarily classified into two groups, namely, Mainland China on the one hand and Hong Kong universities and foreign universities on the other. The most prominent actors were elite institutions, such as Peking University, Fudan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong. The papers published by the Chinese Ministry of Health had relatively high academic impact, whereas those published by Mainland China universities alone had a lower academic impact compared to foreign cooperation papers. Issues related to the Chinese healthcare reform, priority diseases (e.g., breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, etc.), health systems performance, quality of life and measurement tools, aging problems and research methods have been the most popular HSS topics in China in recent years.

Conclusions: Despite the extensive achievement of the Chinese HSS reforms and research, gaps and challenges remain to be addressed, including those related to health insurance and the effects of the evaluation of essential medicine systems, human resources training and allocation in the health sector, government hospitals reforms and health services systems remodeling. These findings could help scholars and decision-makers understand the current status and likely future trends of the Chinese HSS research, and help them select the most appropriate collaboration partners and policies.

Keywords: China; Collaboration patterns; Healthcare science and services; Publication trends; Research topics; Web of Science.

Fig. 1

Chinese HSS papers as a percentage of Chinese papers in all fields

Fig. 2

Chinese HSS papers as a percentage of the world HSS papers

Fig. 3

Percentage of multi-entity in Chinese HSS papers from 2000 to 2014

Fig. 4

Average number of different entities per paper in Chinese HSS papers from 2000 to 2014

Fig. 5

National collaboration map of China in HSS research (The size of the nodes represents the degree centrality of the countries, and the thickness of the lines represents the co-occurrence frequency between countries)

Fig. 6

Institutional collaboration map of China in HSS research (The size of the nodes represents the degree centrality of the institutions, and the thickness of the lines represents the co-occurrence frequency between institutions)

Fig. 7

Co-occurrence clustering map of author keywords (The size of the nodes indicates the frequency of the keywords, and the distance between two nodes is inversely proportional to the number of co-occurrence between keywords, that is, shorter distances suggest greater co-occurrence between keywords)