Background: In recent decades, issues related to end-of-life care and advance care planning (ACP) have attracted popular attention. Advance care planning has been broadly discussed as one of the potential solutions to protect a patient’s rights, autonomy, and dignity at the end of life. To better understand publishing on this topic, we conducted this study to demonstrate the worldwide research productivity, trends, and citations of ACP in the past 3 decades by bibliometric analysis. Methods: Articles published on ACP were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database, and the subject terms included “advance directive,” or “advance care planning.” Results: Overall, 2126 publications on ACP were retrieved until January 22, 2019. North America, Western Europe, and Australia were the most productive regions. The top 15 countries published 95.9% of the total number of articles. The United States accounted for approximately three-fifths (61.0%) of all publications. When adjusted for population size, Australia had the highest number of articles per million persons (6.64), followed by the Netherlands (6.14) and Belgium (4.61). The most productive authors were Sudore (n = 37), Deliens (n = 29), and Green (n = 24). Conclusions: The current study revealed that research in terms of publications on ACP has rapidly increased over the past 3 decades. Developed countries, especially the United States, were more concerned with the ACP research field than developing countries were.

Quantitative analysis via bibliometric field analyses is a recent, gradually emerging method. We conducted a bibliometric study to investigate the authors’ scientific influence and contributions and evaluate trends and research foci in good death-related literature using the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. A total of 1,157 publications were selected for the analysis. There was a significant increase in annual publications per year ( R2 = 0.79). The publication (317, 27.4%) and average citation (29.2) numbers were highest in the USA. Controlling for population number and GDP, the Netherlands had the highest number of articles per million persons (5.89) and US$ 1010 GDP (1.02). North American and Western European countries are leaders in the field, but some East Asian countries (Japan and Taiwan) perform well. Current research focuses on patient perspectives of good death and advance care planning among patients, families, and health care providers.

To explore people’s intentions to opt for a good death when planning for their end-of-life care, this study examined the type of end-of-life care preferred by patients receiving advance care planning (ACP) consulting services for five specified clinical and disability conditions and possible factors affecting their decision-making. This cross-sectional study analyzed 1303 hospital patients and 1032 nonhospital patients who attended a clinic providing ACP consulting services. This study revealed the following two results. First, patients who were older, were female, did not have an appointed surrogate decision-maker, and were nonhospital patients had a higher intention of not receiving life-sustaining treatments (LST) or artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) under the five specified clinical and disability conditions. Second, people who were the least willing to receive LST or ANH under the following conditions (in descending order): permanent vegetative state, severe dementia, irreversible coma, other disease conditions recognized by the central competent authority, and end-of-life stage.