Trends and hot topics in nurse empowerment research: A bibliometric analysis

The characteristics of the publications on nursing empowerment should be investigated in order to get an idea about the development of the field and to determine the developments in nursing practices and research. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of the current knowledge structure and developmental process in nurse empowerment by using bibliometric methods.

The data of this retrospective descriptive study were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS). All relevant studies conducted before 2020 were included in the study. The data analysis was conducted with Excel, SPSS and VOSviewer.

Five hundred eighty-nine studies conducted between 1974-2019 were included in the study. It was found that 72.15% of these studies were journal articles and these studies were conducted by 1,450 authors. The studies were published in 109 journals and were produced by researchers from 49 different countries. Also 47.5% of these studies were conducted in the United States. Hot topics were "empowerment", "nursing," "structural empowerment," "nurses," "job satisfaction" and "psychological empowerment."

There has been a noteworthy increase in the number of studies on nurse empowerment and this field offers an active field of study for nursing researchers. The focus of the studies varies from nurses to nurse managers.