Abstract
Health geographics is a fast-developing research area. Subjects broached in scientific literature are most varied, ranging from vectorial diseases to access to healthcare, with a recent revival of themes such as the implication of health in the Smart City, or a predominantly individual-centered approach. Far beyond standard meta-analyses, the present study deliberately adopts the standpoint of questioning space in its foundations, through various authors of the International Journal of Health Geographics, a highly influential journal in that field. The idea is to find space as the common denominator in this specialized literature, as well as its relation to spatial analysis, without for all that trying to tend towards exhaustive approaches. 660 articles have being published in the journal since launch, but 359 articles were selected based on the presence of the word “Space” in either the title, or the abstract or the text over 13 years of the journal’s existence. From that database, a lexical analysis (tag cloud) reveals the perception of space in literature, and shows how approaches are evolving, thus underlining that the scope of health geographics is far from narrowing.
Highlights
Health Geographics is a relatively recent field of research
The link between man’s health and his environment has been underlined in medical sciences since Hippocrates, it took a long time for geography to consider that studying health facts was interesting and justified
A proper current of health geographics only emerged in the years 1970–1980
Summary
Health Geographics is a relatively recent field of research. the link between man’s health and his environment has been underlined in medical sciences since Hippocrates, it took a long time for geography to consider that studying health facts was interesting and justified. Research is flourishing and concerns themes as varied as the spread of vectorial diseases, access to healthcare, a space’s potential to be or not favorable to health, or looking for environmental determinants in the occurrence of a pathology. Data collection methods The idea was to select articles including the word “space” either in the title, or the abstract or the text. The title and abstract were integrated into a utility software enabling one to carry out a lexical analysis of the corpus, essentially from the most frequent words (TagCrowd) [1,2,3]. We only integrated the articles’ titles and abstracts into the utility, because we considered that they were good indicators of the main words used in the text, bearing in mind that they synthesize the article’s object.
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