Bibliometric analysis of publications on healthcare disparities among sexual and gender minorities: an exploratory study

Abstract

Academic and scientific literature related to healthcare disparities among sexual and gender minorities has increased significantly over the past decade. For this study, a bibliometric analysis will be applied to examine the characteristics, as well as the growth and authorship patterns of worldwide research output, addressing issues related to barriers and disparities of the availability or access to medical services for the LGBTQ population. For this exploratory study, we used the Web of Science database, one of the most widely multidisciplinary databases, that provides the analytical tools for bibliometric calculations. For this analysis, we conducted a bibliographic search on the topic of healthcare disparities in order to collect the representative documents about the topic and to identify authors, document types, year of publications, sources, main thematic areas, most productive institutions, languages and most productive countries of research output. We used an open-source Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny R-package to conduct quantitative analysis. This approach aims to inform the development and trends of research outputs to understand what this research is focusing on, identify research productivity and topic trends.