A Comprehensive Analysis of Patient Safety Research in Nursing: Trends, Topics, and Future Directions

This study aimed to comprehensively analyze patient safety research in the field of nursing over the past 20 years to identify key research topics and emerging trends.

Structural topic modeling, a text mining methodology to identify latent topics from large volumes of unstructured textual data, was conducted on 6072 articles published in the Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and PubMed databases from January 2000 to April 2023. Based on the structural topic modeling results, we performed the Mann-Kendall trend test and conducted community detection.

The analysis identified 39 unique topics, which were categorized into 4 communities: medication safety, structure, processes, and outcomes. Interest in patient safety culture, patient safety education, and qualitative research methodologies has been increasing, while traditional topics such as medical error analysis and nurse staffing have shown a decreasing trend.

The scope of patient safety research in the field of nursing is gradually expanding, with an evident shift in research focus. Our findings provide crucial information for setting future research directions and advancing nursing practice and policy, ultimately contributing to improvements in patient safety.