International aspects in healthcare and medical education: Scientometric trends and knowledge maps before the COVID-19 pandemic

BACKGROUND: Literature shows that healthcare and medical education are associated with the countries/institutes’ developments, and reviewing the global patterns can shed light on various aspects of this competition. The study aims to investigate the current research aspects on the internationalization of healthcare and medical education and assess its trends worldwide. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this descriptive study, based on documents in Web of Science (n = 609), PubMed (n = 395), and Scopus (n = 6598), scientometric methods and knowledge visualization techniques were applied to evaluate global scientific production and trends from 1900 to 2020. Results were preprocessed in BibExcel (version 2016-02-20) to create a mapping file, and word co-occurrence analysis was applied to evaluate the publications. Scientific maps, authors’ networks, and countries’/institutes’ contributions were depicted using VOS (Visualization of Similarity) viewer and NetDraw. For trend analysis, highly frequent words were examined at intervals before 2000, 2000–2004, 2005–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019. RESULTS: Altogether, 129 countries and 14536 (co)authors with 7007 affiliations contributed to the production of 6895 documents. Of the 2378 journals, the top 20 journals published 1298 (18.83%) articles. The top 20 authors together contributed to 247 papers (3.58%). High-income countries made up the most prolific nations. Also, institutes from North America, Europe, and Oceania pioneered production and cooperation. Highly co-occurring words were international cooperation, medical education, medical school, curriculum, medical research, and medical students. CONCLUSION: The countries/institutions’ efforts in internationalizing healthcare and medical education are reflected in the publications in the databases of Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus. Thus, the findings offer evidence-based information about past and present trends and help researchers and policymakers understand their global impact.