The Law Aspects in Health Management: A Bibliometric Analysis of Issues on the Injury, Damage and Harm in Criminal Law

Abstract

The paper presents the analysis of the approaches to define the areas of research on the injury, damage and harm to human health in criminal law. The obtained results proved that crimes, connected to drugs abuse, their legislation become an essential part of the issues. At the same, developing of government control, medical standards, improving quality of medical education balancing the «medical mistake – injury to human’s health – jurisprudence consequences» triangle in the tendency of the injury, damage and harm in criminal laware becoming very important to the healthcare system due to increasing requirements of regulators, customers and shareholders. The paper aimed to analyse the tendency in the literature on the injury, damage and harm in criminal law, which published in books, journals, conference proceedings etc. to identify future research directions. The methodological tools are VOSviewer, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) software. This study covers 1072 papers from Scopus and WoS database. The time for analysis were 1970-2020. The Scopus and WoS analyse showed that in 2012-2019 the numbers of papers on the injury, damage and harm in criminal law issues began to increase. However, the topics changed from general issues to the problem of decriminalisation of drug trafficking, and the corresponding paradigm shift in the punishment of some crimes, increasing interest in punishing corporations for violating environmental regulations. In 2017 the number of documents dedicated to injury, damage and harm in criminal law was increased by 667% compared to 2012. The main subject areas of analyses of the injury, damage and harm in criminal law were the next: Law, Public environmental, occupational health, Criminology penology, Substance abuse, Psychiatry, Medicine. The biggest amount of investigations of the injury, damage and harm in criminal law was published by the scientists from the USA, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. In 2019 such journals with high impact factor as International Journal of Drug Policy, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, The Lancet etc. published the number of issues, which analysed of the injury, damage and harm to human health in criminal law. Such results proved that theme on the injury, damage and harm to human health in criminal law is actually in the ongoing trends of the modern jurisprudence and regulation. The findings from VOSviewer defined 6 clusters of the papers which analysed the injury, damage and harm to human health in criminal law from the different points of views. The first biggest cluster (with the biggest number of connections) merged the keywords as follows: criminal justice, law enforcement, public health, health care policy, harm reduction, drug legislation, drug and narcotic control, substance abuse, homelessness etc. The second significant cluster integrated the keywords as follows: criminal behaviour, crime victim, adolescent, violence, mental health, mental disease, prisoner, young people, rape, police etc. The third biggest cluster concentrated on criminal aspects of jurisprudence, criminal law, human right, legal liability, social control, government regulation etc. The obtained results allow concluding that balancing the triangles «medical mistakes – criminal – education» and «drugs – criminal – justice» and «abortion – criminal – women/children» form an important part of the injury, damage and harm in criminal law issues. Keywords injury, damage, harm, human health, criminal law, management, governance.