TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schreiber, Moritz
A1  - Klingelhöfer, Doris
A1  - Groneberg, Jan David Alexander
A1  - Brüggmann, Dörthe
T1  - Patient safety: the landscape of the global research output and gender distribution
T2  - BMJ open
N2  - Objectives: Patient safety is a crucial issue in medicine. Its main objective is to reduce the number of deaths and health damages that are caused by preventable medical errors. To achieve this, it needs better health systems that make mistakes less likely and their effects less detrimental without blaming health workers for failures. Until now, there is no in-depth scientometric analysis on this issue that encompasses the interval between 1963 and 2014. Therefore, the aim of this study is to sketch a landscape of the past global research output on patient safety including the gender distribution of the medical discipline of patient safety by interpreting scientometric parameters. Additionally, respective future trends are to be outlined.
Setting: The Core Collection of the scientific database Web of Science was searched for publications with the search term ‘Patient Safety’ as title word that was focused on the corresponding medical discipline. The resulting data set was analysed by using the methodology implemented by the platform NewQIS. To visualise the geographical landscape, state-of-the-art techniques including density-equalising map projections were applied.
Results: 4079 articles on patient safety were identified in the period from 1900 to 2014. Most articles were published in North America, the UK and Australia. In regard to the overall number of publications, the USA is the leading country, while the output ratio to the population of Switzerland was found to exhibit the best performance. With regard to the ratio of the number of publications to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per Capita, the USA remains the leading nation but countries like India and China with a low GDP and high population numbers are also profiting.
Conclusions: Though the topic is a global matter, the scientific output on patient safety is centred mainly in industrialised countries.
KW  - medical history
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/40330
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-403304
SN  - 2044-6055
N1  - This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
VL  - 6
IS  - (2):e008322
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - BMJ Publishing Grou
CY  - London
ER  -