Health Care : Current Reviews

The divided communities of shared concerns: Mapping the intellectual structure of e-health research in social science journals

Euro Health Care and Fitness Summit

September 01-03, 2015 Valencia, Spain

L Crystal Jiang

City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Health Care: Current Reviews

Abstract:

Social scientific approach has become an important approach in e-Health studies over the past decade. However, there has been little systematical examination of what aspects of e-Health social scientists have studied and how relevant and informative knowledge has been produced and diffused by this line of inquiry. This study performed a systematic review of the body of e-Health literature in mainstream social science journals over the past decade (2000-2009) by testing the applicability of a 5A-domain categorization (i.e., acceptability, access, applicability, appropriateness and availability), proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services, as a framework for understanding social scientific research in e-Health. A total of 3,005 e-Health studies identified from two social sciences databases (i.e., Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) were analyzed with text topic modeling and structural analysis of citation network, co-citation network and semantic network. The results shows that there have been dramatic increases in the scale of e-Health studies in social sciences over the past decade in terms of the numbers of publications, journal outlets and participating disciplines. The results empirically confirm the presence of the 5A domains in e-Health research, with the domain of applicability as the dominant research area and the domain of availability as the major knowledge producer for other domains. The network analysis also reveals that the five distinctive domains share much more in common in research concerns than what e-Health scholars appear to recognize, which calls for synergy exercises in the future.

Biography :

Email: Crystal.Jiang@cityu.edu.hk