Global trends in the scientific research of the health economics: a bibliometric analysis from 1975 to 2022

Background: Health science is evolving extremely rapidly at worldwide level. There is a large volume of articles about health economics that are published each year. The main purpose of this research is to explore health economics in the world's scholarly literature based on a scient metric analysis to outline the evolution of research in the field.

Method: The Web of Science repository was used to get the data (1975-2022). The study explores 1620 documents from health economics. CiteSpace software was used to provide network visualisations. Four thousand ninety-six authors, 1723 institutions, 847 journals and 82 countries were involved in the sample. The current research contains a descriptive analysis, a co-authorship analysis, a co-citation analysis, and a co-occurrence analysis in health economics.

Results: Drummond M.F (author), the USA (country), University of London (institution) and Value Health (journal) are among the most important contributors to the health economics literature. Co-authorship analysis highlights that cooperation between authors, institutions and countries is weak. However, Drummond M.F. is the most collaborative author, the USA is the most collaborative country, and University of York is the most collaborative institution. The study offers an image about the most co-cited references (Arrow K.J., 1963), authors (Margolis H.) and journals (British Medical Journal). The current research hotspots in health economics are "behavioural economics" and "economic evaluation". The main findings should be interpreted in accordance with the selection strategy used in this paper.

Conclusion: All in all, the paper maps the literature on health economics and may be used for future research.