From Roots to Contemporary Nursing in Ex-Yugoslavian Countries: A Synthetic Review

Abstract

To analyze the development of contemporary nursing in Ex-Yugoslavia countries. A performance and spatial bibliometric analysis combined with synthetic knowledge synthesis were completed to profile the development of the nursing literature production, volume, and thematic content. The corpus was harvested from the Web of Science, limiting the search to the period 1991 to 2020. The search resulted in 1,380 papers. Slovenia was the most productive country, followed by Croatia and Serbia. The synthetic knowledge synthesis revealed that nursing literature production is growing both in scope and number of publications, even though thematic content differs between individual countries. Each country is focused on their local health problems. A substantial part of the research is published in national journals in national languages. However, it is noteworthy that some ex-Yugoslavian authors have succeeded in publishing their research in top English language nursing journals. The study also revealed substantial international cooperation between ex-Yugoslavian countries and individual countries in the European Union. Performance and production of individual countries in nursing research broadly correspond to their overall scientific production, economic and health determinants/indices. The countries which established nursing schools early in the 20th century were considerably more scientifically productive.