Health Advocacy Trends and Unexplored Facets—A Bibliometric Analysis Based on SCOPUS Database

Abstract

This study examines the concept of health advocacy and explores related scholarly material to understand its evolution from 1977 to 2021. The bibliometric analysis investigates the publication trends, most relevant authors, keywords-based clusters, research trends, author productivity, and future research areas in health advocacy. The relevant articles were extracted from the Scopus database and analyzed to identify and explore the most active authors, author-wise contribution to the sources, sub-research topics, core sources, top authors’ production over time, global cited documents, thematic maps, word cloud, country-wise collaboration network and map, author keywords-based network, historiograph, and spectroscope. The study finds that health advocacy as a concept is under-explored and thus warrants a need for future research work. Limited authors have contributed to this theme, and the continuity of publication needs to be improved. The study highlights that there needs to be a robust framework to assess, evaluate, and implement health advocacy. The researchers are limited to only a few authors who have published in limited journals. The current study brings out the need for research and publications on health advocacy to develop a framework for assessing and implementing health advocacy. Also, the study highlights emerging themes of Coronavirus pandemic and emergency and disaster preparation. The niche themes that emerged during the survey highlight keywords such as agenda-setting and maternal health.