INTRODUCTION: Integrated care could not only fix up fragmented health care but also improve the continuity of care and the quality of life. Despite the volume and variety of publications, little is known about how 'integrated care' has developed. There is a need for a systematic bibliometric analysis on studying the important features of the integrated care literature.
AIM: To investigate the growth pattern, core journals and jurisdictions and identify the key research domains of integrated care.
METHODS: We searched Medline/PubMed using the search strategy '(delivery of health care, integrated [MeSH Terms]) OR integrated care [Title/Abstract]' without time and language limits. Second, we extracted the publishing year, journals, jurisdictions and keywords of the retrieved articles. Finally, descriptive statistical analysis by the Bibliographic Item Co-occurrence Matrix Builder and hierarchical clustering by SPSS were used.
RESULTS: As many as 9090 articles were retrieved. Results included: (1) the cumulative numbers of the publications on integrated care rose perpendicularly after 1993; (2) all documents were recorded by 1646 kinds of journals. There were 28 core journals; (3) the USA is the predominant publishing country; and (4) there are six key domains including: the definition/models of integrated care, interdisciplinary patient care team, disease management for chronically ill patients, types of health care organizations and policy, information system integration and legislation/jurisprudence.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Integrated care literature has been most evident in developed countries. International Journal of Integrated Care is highly recommended in this research area. The bibliometric analysis and identification of publication hotspots provides researchers and practitioners with core target journals, as well as an overview of the field for further research in integrated care.
