A bibliometric analysis of health diplomacy research based on VOSviewer and CiteSpace

Abstract

Research on health diplomacy not only deepens global health governance but also enhances the sharing of information and resources in the field of public health. A bibliometric study was conducted on health diplomacy works published between 1993 and 2023 with "health diplomacy", "medicine diplomacy", "health and foreign policy", or "vaccine diplomacy" as the keywords. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were used to perform the bibliometric analysis. A total of 2,216 articles from the Web of Science database were analyzed. Results found that the United States held a prominent and influential position in health diplomacy studies, followed by China, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University were the top three research institutes for health diplomacy. The article from Feldbaum et al. (2010) served as the representative and symbolic reference. These findings showed that topics including power, Covid-19, security, soft power, WHO, vaccine diplomacy, and governance, though with shorter spans, were the focal points in recent years. In addition, health diplomacy research exhibited interdisciplinary, cross-cutting, and temporal characteristics closely related to factors such as politics, economics, environment, and public goods.