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Record W4406191095 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0317209

Creativity research in medicine and nursing: A scoping review

2025· review· en· W4406191095 on OpenAlexafffund
Alex Thabane, Sarah Saleh, Sushmitha Pallapothu, Tyler McKechnie, Phillip Staibano, Jason W. Busse, Goran Calic, Ranil Sonnadara, Sameer Parpia, Mohit Bhandari

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS ONE · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicCreativity in Education and Neuroscience
Canadian institutionsVector InstituteUniversity of TorontoMcMaster UniversityMcMaster University Medical CentreImpact
FundersMcMaster University
KeywordsCreativityPsycINFOMEDLINEPsychologyTest (biology)Medical educationCritical appraisalMedicineAlternative medicineSocial psychologyPolitical sciencePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Creativity fuels societal progress and innovation, particularly in the field of medicine. The scientific study of creativity in medicine is critical to understanding how creativity contributes to medical practice, processes, and outcomes. An appraisal of the current scientific literature on the topic, and its gaps, will expand our understanding of how creativity and medicine interact, and guide future research. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to assess the quantity, trends, distribution, and methodological features of the peer-reviewed on creativity in medicine. METHODS: We searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsycINFO databases for peer-reviewed primary research publications on creativity in medicine. Screening, full-text review, and data extraction were performed independently and in duplicate by pairs of reviewers, with discrepancies resolved by a third reviewer. We performed descriptive analyses, graphically displaying the data using charts and maps where appropriate. RESULTS: Eighty-one studies were eligible for review, enrolling a total of 18,221 physicians, nurses and midwifes across all studies. Most research on creativity in medicine was published in the last decade, predominately in the field of nursing (75%). Researchers from Taiwan (22%) and the United States (21%) produced the most eligible publications, and the majority research was cross-sectional in nature (54%). There was substantial variability in the definitions of creativity adopted, and most studies failed to specify a definition of creativity. Forty-five different measurement tools were used to assess creativity, the most popular being divergent thinking tests such as the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (24%) and Guilford Creativity Tests (16%). CONCLUSIONS: Peer-reviewed scientific research on creativity in medicine, mostly conducted in the nursing profession, is sparse and performed on variable methodological grounds. Further scientific research on the topic, as well as the development of medicine-specific definitions and measurement tools, is required to uncover the utility of creativity in the medical domain.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.042
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.143
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.044
Threshold uncertainty score0.220

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0420.143
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0060.006
Bibliometrics0.0440.038
Science and technology studies0.0030.003
Scholarly communication0.0090.008
Open science0.0030.005
Research integrity0.0060.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.693
GPT teacher head0.619
Teacher spread0.075 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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