A trend study of healthcare by bibliometrics approach

As the “Healthcare Management and Service” began a full exploration of all the possibilities in every research domain at least one decade, this paper is mainly focusing on the trend study of publications which subjects as renowned “Healthcare Management and Service” related papers on Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database from ISI Web of Knowledge (WoK)¹. In order to verify if the distribution of publications can be held by Lotka´ Law, Price´s Law and Pareto Principle, the complete and complete-normalized counting methods were used to calculate the metadata of all collected publications. The result of this study has several outcomes. First, only Lotka´s Law with complete counting method could hold the distribution of contribution indexes of author productivity. Second, authors were less prolific (average one publication has 3.57 co-authors and 92.78% of authors contributed to only one publication). Third, top 4 out of 87 subject areas contributed around 64.49% of all publications and about 50% of publications are categorized into two or more subject areas. Finally, by reading ISI WoK SSCI database, this field still keeps the form of co-authorship and interdisciplinary publishing for having 1,477 co-authors to generate 370 publications in different subject areas. The major research power in this field and the published papers are dramatically growing up from 2008 to 2010. Nowadays, the amount of contributions is still on the peak period but facing the less prolific authors who may not have incentive to publish more than one publication.