Culture Change in Older Adult Care Settings: A Bibliometric Review

We systematically analyzed research on the culture change movement, in the context of global efforts to transform the provision of older adult care in institutional settings.

Using Web of Science and Scopus publications relevant to person-centered care, culture change, or older adult care settings, we built bibliometric networks for keywords and terms extracted from titles and abstracts. Overlays depicted corresponding authors' countries, publication recency, funding, scientific impact, and concept use.

The keyword network for 337 publications revealed variability in culture change settings and study indexing. Term network overlays showed geographical and chronological research variation. Corresponding authors from 14 countries contributed publications, mostly from the United States (69% of publications), Canada (9%), and Australia (5%). Social environment and person-centeredness studies, particularly in dementia care settings, were more recent than studies on physical environment, quality, organizational culture, turnover, and staffing. Scholars listed funding sources for 38% of publications; funding and scientific impact did not always overlap. Well-cited studies on standards of care and policy were funded at a lower rate than topics of lower impact. Over 60% of titles, abstracts, or keywords referred to quality and person-centeredness.

Originating in the 1990s in the United States, culture change quickly became an international phenomenon, drawing researchers' attention. Change research has deep roots in quality improvement and person-centered philosophy. We offered practical strategies for querying this hard to access literature. With some database-related limitations, empirical data on scientific impact can be used to allocate research funding.