Research articles on volunteering in biomedical journals: a MEDLINE-based bibliometric analysis

OBJECTIVE: Volunteering, an important aspect of society, is a multidisciplinary issue. However, there few are extensive surveys examining the trend and scope of research on volunteering in biomedical areas. METHODS: Publications indexed with the Medical Subject Headings “volunteers” or “hospital volunteers” were downloaded from MEDLINE. We excluded publications indexed with “healthy volunteers” from the analysis. RESULTS: A total 3555 research articles on volunteering were found in 1283 journals, through the end of 2016. The number of publications increased gradually from 1 article in 1953 to 254 articles in 2016. Only 51 journals had published 10 or more articles on this topic. Research articles on volunteering were published in journals with 110 specialties and were most often in journals related to public health, nursing, and health services. The largest proportion of articles was related to psychology. Although 10,853 authors were identified in 3555 articles, only eight authors have published more than 10 research articles on volunteering. CONCLUSION: Research interest in volunteering in biomedical areas has been growing in recent decades, but the total number of publications on volunteering remains relatively small.