Physician-patient relations:current studies and hotspot analysis using PubMed database / 中华医院管理杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To retrieve literature on physician-patients relations for analysis of current studies and hotspots. Methods Papers on physician-patient relations published from January 2013 to September 2017 were retrieved in PubMed using such key words as "physician-patient relations" and"nurse-patient relations" respectively for analysis and comparison. Bibliographies of literature on such relations were downloaded, and their publication years, journals, and countries of the journal, as well as their first authors were also analyzed. High frequency words were chosen using a new method based on Zipf's law to identify the cut-off points of high-low frequency words in the corpus. Then the co-word matrix was formed using BICOMB2 to calculate the frequency of main key words,and a dendrogram was developed using SPSS 24.0 for clustering analysis. Results A total of 4 924 papers on physician-doctor relations were reviewed using 74 key words with occurrence higher than 31 times, and 2 145 papers on nurse-patient relations were retrieved using 41 key words with occurrence higher than 25 times. Co-word clustering analysis found six research focuses in recent five years "informed consent and ethical issues","communication barriers", "trust", "implementation and construction of training courses for improving the relationship between doctors and patients","hospice care", and "patient participation in shared decision-making". It also found four research focuses on nurse-patient relations "health knowledge, attitude and behavior", "communication and psychological nursing", "psychiatry and hospice care", and "patient centered and patient education". Conclusions Co-word clustering analysis found six research focuses in the recent five years helps understand the current situation and development trend.