Mapping the landscape: A scientometric analysis of health professions education literature in Hispanic America

Health professions education (HPE) scholarship is expanding but remains unevenly distributed by region and language. Scientometrics can guide efforts to strengthen bibliodiversity, particularly for Global South regions underrepresented in HPE meta-research.

This study aims to characterise publications from Hispanic America across medicine, nursing, dentistry and veterinary medicine, examining productivity, venues, collaboration, gender and thematic evolution.

We analysed HPE journal articles (1992-2025) indexed in PubMed, Scopus and SciELO Citation Index (Web of Science), requiring ≥1 Hispanic American author affiliation. Records were merged, deduplicated and curated, and then analysed in Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny (Bradford concentration, author productivity, networks). Author gender was inferred from names using gender-guesser.

We retrieved 3608 publications (annual growth 7.8%) authored by 11 240 individuals from 1563 institutions and published in 796 journals. [Correction added on 20 August 2026, after the first online publication: the preceding sentence has been corrected.] Medicine accounted for most articles (n = 2182), followed by nursing (n = 637), dentistry (n = 318), veterinary medicine (n = 68) and mixed health sciences (n = 403). The year 2023 was most productive (319 articles). Four hundred thirty-seven papers were single-authored. Author productivity was long-tailed (83.4% published once; 1.2% published >5 articles). International co-authorship was 17.2%; collaboration formed cohesive clusters with limited bridging. Publishing was concentrated: 15 core journals (1.9%) produced 34% of articles. Chile, Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Cuba led the output. Two thousand three hundred and six (64%) were in Spanish, 1260 (34.9%) in English, and 42 (1.1%) in both. Gender was near balanced (female 50.7%, male 47.3%; 0.35% androgynous and 1.7% unclassified), but women were underrepresented among the most prolific authors. Keywords emphasised teaching/learning and curricula/assessment, with post-2020 prominence of mental health and distance education/simulation training.

HPE scholarship in Hispanic America is growing, but expansion is occurring within an ecosystem marked by concentration and uneven connectivity ('growth with fragility') and centre-periphery dynamics in scholarly communication. Recognising multilingual evidence and investing in bibliodiversity through bilingual dissemination/metadata, open identifiers and equitable collaboration can broaden the evidence base and support educational impact.