A Social Network Analysis of Research Topics in Korean Nursing Science

Abstract

Purpose: This study was done to explore the knowledge structure of Korean Nursing Science. Methods: The main variables were key words from the research papers that were presented in the Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing and journals of the seven branches of the Korean Academy of Nursing. English titles and abstracts of the papers (n= 5,936) published from 1995 through 2009 were included. Noun phrases were extracted from the corpora using an in-house program (BiKE Text Analyzer), and their co-occurrence networks were generated via a cosine similarity measure, and then the networks were analyzed and visualized using Pajek, a Social Network Analysis program. Results: With the hub and authority measures, the most important research topics in Korean Nursing Science were identified. Newly emerging topics by three-year period units were observed as research trends. Conclusion: This study provides a systematic overview on the knowledge structure of Korean Nursing Science. The Social Network Analysis for this study will be useful for identifying the knowledge structure in Nursing Science.

Social Network Analysis of Elders' Health Literacy and their Use of Online Health Information

“…SNA converts the relationships between studies and their results into easily understood visual models [18,20,21]. In Korea, research using SNA has recently been published in healthcare [22,23,24,25,26]. Of these studies, only a few extracted MeSH terms from the NLM database [22,27,28].…”

Application of Social Network Analysis to Health Care Sectors

“…Researchers have also used specific field-related keywords as a unit of analysis to examine the change in research topics over time. A few studies examined the social network within the school of medicine in Korea [9] by extracting keywords from studies in different subfields such as medical information [10] and nursing [11]. Social network research in the field, conducted in the nation, has historically used researcher-extracted keywords or used indices for the analysis.…”

“…Furthermore, studies that use different keywords that have the same meaning must use an index extractor to standardize the keywords [21]. Therefore, for studies conducted by Korean researchers, knowledge maps were drawn up from extracted abstract keywords and classified as a thematic cluster [10,11,33]. Studies by Korean researchers have examined core word networks for preventative medicine [7] or epidemiology [8].…”

“…Studies by Korean researchers have examined core word networks for preventative medicine [7] or epidemiology [8]. A study in nursing also used keywords extracted from 8 academic journals from 1995 to 2009 to examine research topic networks [11]. Using social network analysis, medical informatics study keywords were extracted from 1,075 research papers and proceedings published in 1995-2008 [10].…”

Book Review: Social Networks and Health: Models, Methods, and Applications

“…Social networks are defined as a social structure connecting a set of actors such as people, organizations, political entities (states or nations), and/or other units [3]. Researchers in various fields have employed the methods of social network analysis to medical [4-6], epidemiology [7], and nursing [8] fields.…”