Mapping the Scientific Research on Healthcare Workers’ Occupational Health: A Bibliometric and Social Network Analysis

In the last few years, the occupational health (OH) of healthcare workers (HCWs) has been shown increasing concern by both health departments and researchers. This study aims to provide academics with quantitative and qualitative analysis of healthcare workers’ occupational health (HCWs+OH) field in a joint way. Based on 402 papers published from 1992 to 2019, we adopted the approaches of bibliometric and social network analysis (SNA) to map and quantify publication years, research area distribution, international collaboration, keyword co-occurrence frequency, hierarchical clustering, highly cited articles and cluster timeline visualization. In view of the results, several hotspot clusters were identified, namely: physical injuries, workplace, mental health; occupational hazards and diseases, infectious factors; community health workers and occupational exposure. As for citations, we employed document co-citation analysis to detect trends and identify seven clusters, namely tuberculosis (TB), strength training, influenza, healthcare worker (HCW), occupational exposure, epidemiology and psychological. With the visualization of cluster timeline, we detected that the earliest research cluster was occupational exposure, then followed by epidemiology and psychological; however, TB, strength training and influenza appeared to gain more attention in recent years. These findings are presumed to offer researchers, public health practitioners a comprehensive understanding of HCWs+OH research.

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Understanding Researchers Collaboration in eParticipation using Social Network Analysis

International Journal of Electronic Government Research ◽

10.4018/ijegr.2015100103 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 11 (4) ◽

pp. 38-68

Author(s):

Eleni Kaliva ◽

Dimitrios Katsioulas ◽

Efthimios Tambouris ◽

Konstantinos Tarabanis

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Social Network Analysis ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Research Area ◽

Core Network ◽

Academic Field ◽

The Social ◽

High Degree ◽

Political Priority ◽

Scientific Collaborations

Over the past years electronic participation (eParticipation) became a political priority worldwide. Consequently, research on the field has dramatically grown. However, eParticipation is still an unconsolidated research area that lacks generally agreed upon definitions, research disciplines, methods and boundaries. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the establishment of the eParticipation identity by investigating the scientific collaborations in the domain. The study of the nature of academic collaboration reveals the structure and the intellectual roots of the research community and the most influential authors. The approach followed in this paper includes the construction of the co-authorship network and the calculation of the social network analysis (SNA) metrics that describe the nature of the collaboration. The results revealed that eParticipation is a rather active academic field in the last decade including a high degree of collaboration and a core network of very influential researchers.

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Prioritizing Healthcare Worker Vaccinations on the Basis of Social Network Analysis

Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology ◽

10.1086/655466 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 31 (9) ◽

pp. 893-900 ◽

Cited By ~ 36

Author(s):

Philip M. Polgreen ◽

Troy Leo Tassier ◽

Sriram Venkata Pemmaraju ◽

Alberto Maria Segre

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Social Network Analysis ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Healthcare Workers ◽

Computational Simulation ◽

Vaccination Strategy ◽

Occupational Therapists ◽

Agent Based ◽

X Ray ◽

Vaccination Rates

Objective.To use social network analysis to design more effective strategies for vaccinating healthcare workers against influenza.Design.An agent-based simulation.Setting.A simulation based on a 700-bed hospital.Methods.We first observed human contacts (defined as approach within approximately 0.9 m) performed by 15 categories of healthcare workers (eg, floor nurses, intensive care unit nurses, staff physicians, phlebotomists, and respiratory therapists). We then constructed a series of contact graphs to represent the social network of the hospital and used these graphs to run agent-based simulations to model the spread of influenza. A targeted vaccination strategy that preferentially vaccinated more “connected” healthcare workers was compared with other vaccination strategies during simulations with various base vaccination rates, vaccine effectiveness, probability of transmission, duration of infection, and patient length of stay.Results.We recorded 6,654 contacts by 148 workers during 606 hours of observations from January through December 2006. Unit clerks, X-ray technicians, residents and fellows, transporters, and physical and occupational therapists had the most contacts. When repeated contacts with the same individual were excluded, transporters, unit clerks, X-ray technicians, physical and occupational therapists, and social workers had the most contacts. Preferentially vaccinating healthcare workers in more connected job categories yielded a substantially lower attack rate and fewer infections than a random vaccination strategy for all simulation parameters.Conclusions.Social network models can be used to derive more effective vaccination policies, which are crucial during vaccine shortages or in facilities with low vaccination rates. Local vaccination priorities can be determined in any healthcare facility with only a modest investment in collection of observational data on different types of healthcare workers. Our findings and methods (ie, social network analysis and computational simulation) have implications for the design of effective interventions to control a broad range of healthcare-associated infections.

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Professional advice for primary healthcare workers in Ethiopia: a social network analysis

BMC Health Services Research ◽

10.1186/s12913-020-05367-3 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Kate Sabot ◽

Karl Blanchet ◽

Della Berhanu ◽

Neil Spicer ◽

Joanna Schellenberg

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Social Network Analysis ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Primary Healthcare ◽

Healthcare Workers ◽

Professional Advice

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Social Network Analysis, Ethics and LGPD, considerations in research

iSys - Brazilian Journal of Information Systems ◽

10.5753/isys.2021.1235 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 28-52

Author(s):

Luiz Paulo Carvalho ◽

Jonice Oliveira ◽

Flávia Maria Santoro ◽

Claudia Cappelli

Keyword(s):

Social Network ◽

Social Network Analysis ◽

Network Analysis ◽

Knowledge Construction ◽

Personal Data ◽

Research Area ◽

Research Field ◽

Data Driven ◽

Brazilian Society ◽

The Social

Data protection and data-driven solutions are two progressing areas permeating Brazilian society. This work presents an interdisciplinary theoretical approach related to Ethics, from the ethics in computing perspective; the LGPD, from the Law studies perspective; and the Social Network Analysis in Brazil, from the Informatics perspective. This research area utilizes personal data extensively for knowledge construction, with semantic contributions, analyzing the reality; or pragmatic, building artifacts. Challenges and inseparable issues are observed, exposed, and debated in this work. We present considerations combining the three topics, personal data in the research field of social networks in Brazil respecting the LGPD and ethics precepts.

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