Abstract
International nursing research comparisons can give a new perspective on a nation's output by identifying strengths and weaknesses. This article compares strengths in nursing research between six mainly English-speaking nations (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States). Journal authorship (percentage of first authorship by nationality) and article keywords were compared for Scopus-indexed journal articles 2008-2018. Three natural language processing strategies were assessed for identifying statistically significant international differences in the use of keywords or phrases. Journal author nationality was not a good indicator of international differences in research specialisms, but keyword and phrase differences were more promising especially if both are used. For this, the part of speech tagging and lemmatisation text processing strategies were helpful but not named entity recognition. The results highlight aspects of nursing research that were absent in some countries, such as papers about nursing administration and management. Researchers outside the United States should consider the importance of researching specific patient groups, diseases, treatments, skills, research methods and social perspectives for unresearched gaps with national relevance. From a methods perspective, keyword and phrase differences are useful to reveal international differences in nursing research topics.
Highlights
Identifying gaps in a nation's nursing research allows international perspectives to inform national research and practice
All journal articles from all 24 Scopus nursing categories published between 2008 and 2018 were downloaded with the Scopus Applications Programming Interface (API) on 10–11 October 2018 with queries of the following form, where 2914 is the code for Medical and Surgical Nursing and the publication year was sent as a separate parameter
A practical implication is that national areas of nurse research can only be detected by analysing at the article level and not at the journal shares level
Summary
Identifying gaps in a nation's nursing research allows international perspectives to inform national research and practice. Research fields are often studied using network analysis techniques, including author co-citation analysis (Bu, Ni, & Huang, 2017; White & McCain, 1998) or co-word maps (e.g., based on keywords or titles and/or abstract terms that occur in multiple papers; Waltman, Van Eck, & Noyons, 2010). Clusters in these maps can point to topics of interest. Topic modelling can be applied to keywords or titles/abstracts to identify the main underlying topics within a collection of articles (Talley et al, 2011) These methods produce term clusters that may reflect research themes or topics.
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