A worldwide bibliometric analysis of published literature on workplace violence in healthcare personnel

BACKGROUND: Workplace violence in healthcare professionals has become a worldwide public health problem and has been the focus of numerous publications; however, currently, no macroscopic overviews of this research based on bibliometric analysis have been carried out. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to analyse the research trends focusing on workplace violence in healthcare personnel over the last 27 years. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A bibliometric study was conducted from 1992 to 2019 in the field of workplace violence in healthcare personnel using the Scopus database. The author co-citation analysis was carried out using VOSviewer software. A worldwide map was created with Mapchart and word cloud image was created using Wordart. Descriptive and inferential statistics were applied. FINDINGS: 1791 records were analysed, 1376 of which (76.83%) were articles, with “Medicine” the most frequent subject category (58.91%). English was the predominant language (93.41%). From 2004 onwards, there was an exponential rise in the number of publications (R(2) coefficient = 0.89; p < 0.0001) and the number of annual citations gradually increased from 1995 (R(2) coefficient = 0.73; p < 0.0001). The University of Cincinnati (United States) was the institution (and country) with the highest number of publications (n = 30; n = 549), with D. M. Gates leading the ranking of the most productive authors (n = 21). Journal of Nursing Management was the most active journal publishing on the topic (n = 34) and the commonest keyword was “human/s” (16.43%). CONCLUSION: From 1992 to 2019, worldwide research into the published literature on workplace violence in healthcare personnel has grown steadily year by year, both in the number of documents and the number of citations. United States and their institutions and researchers dominates this research output.