# Incentives in prescribing, dispensing and pharmaceutical spending: A scientometric mapping

## TL;DR

This study maps global scientific research on how incentives affect medicine prescriptions, dispensing, and pharmaceutical spending, highlighting key contributors and research gaps.

## Contribution

The paper provides a scientometric analysis of global research trends on pharmaceutical incentives and spending, identifying leadership and gaps.

## Key findings

- The United Kingdom and the United States lead in scientific production on pharmaceutical incentives and spending.
- Research focuses on financing policies, incentives, and rational medicine use.
- Latin American contributions to this field are scarce, indicating a potential area for future research.

## Abstract

Health systems worldwide are struggling to ensure the affordability of medicines. Prescription, dispensing, and pharmaceutical expenditures are key variables that highlight the need to understand how global scientific evidence is generated against factors (implicit and non-explicit) that influence these variables.

To provide a panorama of scientific production on drug prescription and dispensing, and its relationship with pharmaceutical expenditure in health systems worldwide.

A five-stage scientometric mapping was performed based on a systematic search of 8 databases. The five stages are: i) retrieval, ii) migration, iii) analysis, iv) visualization and v) interpretation.

A corpus of evidence from 103 systematic literature reviews was obtained, screened and sifted, visualizing the countries, authors, databases, journals, institutions and time periods that contributed most to evidence generation. Central research themes are identified and phenomena related to article publication are discussed.

The analysis reveals a clear leadership of the United Kingdom and the United States in scientific production on prescribing, dispensing and pharmaceutical expenditure in health systems worldwide. This scientific production is mainly focused on financing policies, pharmaceutical incentives and interventions, and rational use of medicines. There is also evidence of the scarcity of scientific production in Latin American publications and authors, which could generate interest for future research.