Fatemeh Makkizadeh; Azam Rohani; Ebrahim Zalzadeh; Ahmad Kalate-Sadati
Abstract
Introduction: Graphical mapping of an academic field make it more accurate to identify the branches of human knowledge and transform the concept of abstraction to concrete objectives. This study aimed to map the related articles in medical sociology field.Methods: The descriptive-analytical study analyzed ...
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Introduction: Graphical mapping of an academic field make it more accurate to identify the branches of human knowledge and transform the concept of abstraction to concrete objectives. This study aimed to map the related articles in medical sociology field.Methods: The descriptive-analytical study analyzed the content of the texts with a scientometrics approach. The sample included all international scientific articles in the field of medical sociology indexed in PubMed database from 1945-2018. UCINET and NetDraw were used to analyze the data and draw the scientific map.Results: According to the indicators of centrality, the topic of "physician-patient relationship" was ranked first in all three types of centrality. According to the indicators of closeness and degree, the prominent value was given to the thematic categories of "health attitude" and "social and economic factors". Besides, the topic of "medical care delivery" had the most prominent value in terms of betweenness centrality.Conclusion: The social network analysis indexes are effective in analyzing scientific maps. The formed thematic structure and the relationship between them show the interdisciplinary nature of the field of medical sociology. Some important issues related to medical sociology, such as social parameters affecting treatment and rehabilitation, epidemiological research, and healthy behavior, have received less attention.
