Medical ethics in the pre-pandemic era: an analysis of peer-reviewed original research and network structures

Medical Ethics integrates scientific approaches from ethics, philosophy, religious studies, history, and sociology into all relevant fields and subdisciplines of medicine, biomedicine, and healthcare. However, there is a lack of detailed analysis of research activity and networking of peer-reviewed research in Medical Ethics.

Consequently, this study employs established bibliometric methods to examine the chronological, geographical, and thematic patterns of global research, as well as network structures, by analyzing metadata retrieved from the Web of Science.

The analysis identified a total of 11,663 articles published in journals in the field of Medical Ethics. The number of articles peaked slightly in 2015 but remained more or less constant otherwise. From a global perspective, the USA was the dominant country in absolute numbers, followed by China and Japan. By contrast, the European countries Sweden, Austria, and Norway were positioned first when the research activity was related to the population size. Large parts of Africa, South Asia, and South America/Caribbean are virtually not present in the global landscape of Medical Ethics research, although these areas offer many open questions. Although a far-reaching, global network has been established, networking primarily takes place among English-speaking countries such as the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia, while developing countries in particular are underrepresented.

The growth in publication numbers is not as steep as in other fields and is imbalanced from a global viewpoint. Therefore, countries with weaker economies should be systematically encouraged to participate in international research collaborations.