Research on Nurses’ Psychological Empowerment: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Psychological empowerment is a cultural, social, or psychological process that enhances individual control and autonomy over thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by developing attributes like self-identity, autonomy, and self-efficacy, which are integral to success in modern organizational management, particularly in service sectors like nursing. This study aimed to analyze the study focus, thematic trends, and evolution of studies on nurse psychological empowerment by using bibliometric analysis. The articles on nurses' psychological empowerment were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) database from its inception to November 30, 2023. The R package “bibliometrix” was used to conduct the data analysis and graphical presentation. A total of 188 publications on nurses' psychological empowerment were included. Publications were mainly from the USA, Canada, and China. The most frequent keywords included “empowerment”, “psychological empowerment”, “nurses”, “nursing”, “job satisfaction”, “structural empowerment”, “burnout” and “leadership”, the most frequent topics were “power”, “settings”, “work satisfaction”, and “turnover”. This bibliometric analysis identified the research trend of nurses’ psychological empowerment in the past 25 years, and this subject has already become an active field of study in nursing research. In addition, nurse retention-related themes such as job satisfaction, and work environment have become hot topics in current research while structural equation model-based themes have been less studied.