Research status and trends analysis of long-term care: A bibliometric analysis

Long-term care (LTC) is a fundamental system in many countries that provides essential aged care services and promotes the physical and mental well-being of older adults. This study visually maps the progress and trends in LTC research, offering theoretical references for fellow scholars and practitioners. Using the Web of Science Core Collection as the data source, we retrieved publications on LTC from 2010 to 2024. CiteSpace bibliometric software was employed with a time slice of 1 year and a selection threshold of top 50 per slice. Co-occurrence and collaboration networks were analyzed for keywords, authors, and institutions. The United States contributed the highest number of publications (1896). Among journals, The Lancet published the most articles (2568). The University of Toronto exhibited the strongest centrality (0.23). The top 5 most frequent keywords were "long-term care" (1666 occurrences), "dementia" (726), "nursing home" (674), "health" (615), and "older adult" (551). Qualitative synthesis further identified major research themes including long-term mortality among LTC recipients, nursing home residents, LTC insurance, pragmatic trials, and social isolation. Author collaboration networks showed only small clusters with weak overall connectivity; institutional collaborations were also limited, predominantly involving universities. This fragmented cooperation pattern did not improve significantly over time, providing a critical benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of academic community building within the field. Notably, all high-frequency keywords exhibited extremely low centrality values (0.01-0.02), indicating that while a large volume of research centers on a few core terms, the knowledge linkages between these topics and broader research issues remain weak. Additionally, burst detection revealed strong emergence of terms such as "unit" and "setting," further highlighting an exceptionally high concentration of research attention on micro-level care facility issues. Future research should strengthen international collaboration at the macro-level, expand the target population of LTC to a wider range of older adults at the meso level, and address the chronic disease needs of older individuals at the micro-level, thereby advancing the development of LTC systems.