Multidisciplinary Contributions and Research Trends in eHealth Scholarship (2000-2024): Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Background: Fueled by innovations in technology and health interventions to promote, restore, and maintain health and safeguard well-being, the field of eHealth has yielded significant scholarly output over the past 25 years.

Objective: This study aims to offer a big picture of research developments and multidisciplinary contributions to eHealth that shaped this field up to 2024. To that end, we analyze evidence from 3 corpora: 10,022 OpenAlex documents with eHealth in the title, the 5000 most relevant eHealth articles according to the Web of Science (WoS) algorithm, and all available (n=1885) WoS eHealth reviews.

Methods: Using VOSviewer, we built co-occurrence networks for WoS keywords and OpenAlex concepts. We examined clusters, categorized terminology, and added custom overlays about eHealth technologies, stakeholders, and objectives. A cocitation map of sources referenced in WoS reviews helped identify scientific fields supporting eHealth. After synthesizing eHealth terminology, we proceeded to build a conceptual model of eHealth scholarship grounded in bibliometric evidence.

Results: Several research directions emerged from bibliometric networks: eHealth studies on self-management and interventions, especially in mental health; telemedicine, telehealth, and technology acceptance; privacy, security, and design concerns; health information consumers' literacy; health promotion and prevention; mHealth and digital health; and HIV prevention. Conducted at the individual, health system, community, and society levels, eHealth studies focused on health and wellness across the human lifespan. Keywords such as internet (mean publication year 2017), telemedicine (2018), telehealth (2018), mHealth (2019), mobile health (2020), and digital health (2021) were strongly linked to literature indexed with eHealth (2019). Different types of eHealth apps were supported by research on infrastructures: networks, data exchange, computing technologies, information systems, and platforms. Researchers' concerns for eHealth data security and privacy, including advanced access control and encryption methods, featured prominently in the maps, along with terminology related to health analytics. Review authors cited a wide range of medical sources and journals specific to eHealth technologies, as well as journals in psychology, psychiatry, public health, policy, education, health communication, and other fields. The Journal of Medical Internet Research stood out as the most cited source. The concept map showed a prominent role of political science and law, economics, nursing, business, and knowledge management. Our empirically derived conceptual model of eHealth scholarship incorporated commonly researched stakeholder groups, eHealth application types, supporting infrastructure, health analytics concepts, and outcomes.

Conclusions: Drawing upon contributions from many disciplines, the field of eHealth has evolved from early studies of internet-enabled communications, telemedicine, and telehealth to research on mobile health and emerging digital health technologies serving diverse stakeholders. Digital health has become a popular alternative term to eHealth. We offered practical implications and recommendations on future research directions, as well as guidance on study design and publication.

Keywords: AI; VOSviewer; app; application; artificial intelligence; bibliometric analysis; conceptual model; digital; digital health; digital intervention; digital technology; eHealth; electronic health; mHealth; mobile application; mobile health; remote consultation; smartphone; telehealth; telemedicine; virtual care; virtual health; virtual medicine.

Figure 1

PRISMA diagram for eHealth publications included in this review. WoS: Web of Science.

Figure 2

Keyword co-occurrence network (cluster map) for 5000 eHealth articles. Keywords that occur ≥10 times were mapped. An interactive map is available from Leiden University’s VOSviewer Online application.

Figure 3

Keyword co-occurrence network (cluster map) for 1885 eHealth reviews. Keywords that occur ≥10 times were mapped. An interactive map is available from Leiden University’s VOSviewer application.

Figure 4

Publication recency overlays to maps in Figures 1 and 2: keywords indexing articles (top) and reviews (bottom). Interactive overlays (articles and reviews).

Figure 5

Cocitation network (cluster map) of sources for 1885 eHealth reviews. Sources that occurred ≥50 times in eHealth reviews’ reference lists were mapped. Link to an interactive map.

Figure 6

Concept co-occurrence network (cluster map) for 10,022 eHealth articles from OpenAlex. Concepts that occur ≥20 times were mapped. An interactive map is available from Leiden University’s VOSviewer application.