Nursing Research Literature Production in Terms of the Scope of Country and Health Determinants: A Bibliometric Study

PURPOSE: The aim of this paper was to present the results of the first study in which nursing research literature production was studied in the relation to country and health determinants. DESIGN: Bibliometric analysis was used. METHODS: The corpus of nursing publications was harvested from the Scopus indexing and abstracting database. Using research articles' metadata (funding acknowledgments, publication years, and author affiliations), we analyzed global trends in the nursing research literature production of funded and nonfunded publications. Next, we performed a regression analysis and correlation analysis relating nursing research productivity to health and country determinants. FINDINGS: The search resulted in 118,870 papers, among which 22.0% were funded (24.7% for G8 countries). Nursing literature production is exhibiting a positive trend. The United States is by far the most productive country in terms of funded and nonfunded literature production, although it is ranked only ninth in per capita production, for which Sweden is the most productive country regarding funded papers. The study also revealed that gross domestic product, human development factor, and gross national income were related to nursing research literature productivity. CONCLUSIONS: The positive trend in nursing research literature production (both funded and nonfunded) reveals a growth in nursing research funding. Regionally centered research literature production shows that the more developed and "rich" countries produce the majority of publications. A positive correlation is evident between country determinants and research literature production, as is a positive correlation between per capita literature research production and well-being and health determinants. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Substantial growth in terms of nursing research literature production and research funding has been identified. While a limited amount of research in this area exists, this study revealed some interesting relations between nursing literature production and country and health determinants, which might motivate nursing researchers to pursue more intensive research and funders to support further growth of nursing research funding.