Rising gamification in health education: A bibliometric study

The rising gamification in educational contexts has been driven by its potential to increase student motivation, engagement, interest and learning outcomes. Thanks to these effects, gamification has gained popularity in health education. Due to the increase in studies on gamification in health education in recent years, this study has been carried out to present the studies in the relevant literature to researchers.

This study presents a quantitative mapping of gamification in health education through a bibliometric analysis of its publications.

In this study, a total of 475 articles were analyzed by searching "health education*" and "gamif*" and similar terms from Web of Science and Scopus databases. R bibliometric package program was used for the analysis. 1971 authors contributed to the studies, which were spread between 2012 and 2024. The number of studies on gamification in the field of health education has grown in recent years. In particular, it was seen that 2018 can be seen as the breaking point and the highest number of publications was in 2023, with 101 publications.

The descriptive results showed that Zhang, X. was the most productive author, Nurse Education Today and BMC Medical Education were the most productive journals and the United States was the most productive country. It is concluded that terms such as gamification, medical education, game-based learning, education, serious games, simulation and e-learning are the most frequently used words in gamification studies in the field of health education. It has been observed that the concept of gamification is trending, especially in 2018-2023, with a frequency of 150 uses.

This study is expected to guide researchers in terms of key points for future research on gamification in health education contexts. It is expected that the knowledge provided by this study will enable researchers to be involved in this field and/or focus their research more effectively.