Bridging Humanities and Medicine: A Bibliometric Journey Through Five Developmental Stages (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND The rapid advancement of medical technology and the growing strain on doctor-patient relationships have heightened global attention to medical humanities education. However, there remains a lack of systematic analysis of its developmental trajectory and emerging trends. OBJECTIVE This study aims to visually analyze the current research landscape in medical humanities education and systematically elucidate its developmental phases and emerging trends using bibliometric methods. METHODS We conducted a bibliometric analysis using CiteSpace 6.2.R4 to examine literature on medical humanities education indexed in the Web of Science core database from January 1,2000, to October 1,2024. After screening,835 papers were included for analysis of publication trends, collaboration networks, co-citation patterns, keyword co-occurrence, and clustering. RESULTS The analyzed publications received an average of 15.24 citations each. Annual publications peaked in 2023 (119 papers), while total citations peaked the same year (1711 citations). The United States contributed the most publications (40%), followed by the United Kingdom, China, and Canada. Rita Charon was the most frequently cited author (162 citations), and "Academic Medicine" was the most cited journal. High-frequency keywords included "medical education," "medical humanities," "narrative medicine," "health humanities," "medical students," and "medical ethics." The analysis identified five developmental stages: Initial Stage (pre-1967), Beginning Stage (1967-1990s), Development Stage (1990s-2009), Questioning Stage (2009-2019), and Prosperity Stage (2019-present). CONCLUSIONS This study provides a comprehensive mapping of medical humanities education development through spatiotemporal network diagrams. The findings offer valuable insights for medical educators, researchers, and administrators to understand the historical evolution, current status, and future directions in this field. Enhanced understanding can improve the quality of medical humanities education and strengthen future physicians' abilities in medical humanities practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.093 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.060 | 0.133 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".