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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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.662
Threshold uncertainty score0.783

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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 teacher head, 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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