Two Decades of Medical Education Scholarship: Mapping Collaboration and Thematic Shifts Using Web of Science (2000–2019)

TL;DR

This study maps changes in medical education research from 2000 to 2019, showing growing collaboration and thematic shifts toward teaching, quantitative methods, and psychosocial topics.

Contribution

The study provides an evidence-based mapping of medical education's evolution using bibliometric analysis of 31,338 publications.

Findings

U.S. institutions remained central in collaborations, with Canadian and Dutch institutions gaining prominence.

Teaching and learning remained dominant, while quantitative research themes expanded over time.

Collaboration trends suggest field maturation, though geographic imbalances persist.

Abstract

The field of medical education (ME) has grown substantially over the past decades, yet questions remain about its scope and boundaries. This study examines how research topics and institutional collaborations have evolved in ME from 2000 to 2019.

Adopting a post-positivist stance and using bibliometric network analyses, we examined metadata from 31,338 publications across 22 core ME journals indexed in the Web of Science. We analyzed trends in institutional collaboration and the development of research themes. Extracted metadata included authors’ institutional affiliations and KeyWords Plus (n = 18,218). Bibliometric analyses were conducted using VOSviewer, a widely used tool for network mapping. We generated co-authorship networks to trace institutional collaboration and co-word networks to identify thematic clusters.

Co-authorship networks revealed increasing collaboration, with U.S. institutions remaining central and Canadian and Dutch institutions gaining prominence. Co-word analyses identified three stable clusters—teaching and learning, quantitative, and psychosocial—with teaching and learning dominant across all periods and the quantitative cluster expanding in recent years.

Findings show the consolidation of teaching and learning as the foundation of ME, alongside diversification through quantitative and psychosocial themes. Growing collaborations suggest the field’s maturation, though geographic imbalances persist. Limitations include reliance on a restricted set of Web of Science journals, which overrepresent English-language and highly cited publications, and the use of KeyWords Plus as a proxy for themes. This study offers an evidence-based mapping of ME’s evolution and provides a framework for future research on the interdisciplinary and global dynamics of the field.

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