Progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (2018–2022): A descriptive and bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science (WOS) dataset
International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing
ISSN: 1750-6123
Article publication date: 1 January 2024
Issue publication date: 12 April 2024
Abstract
Purpose
Health-care marketing typically entails a coordinated set of outreach and communications designed to attract consumers (patients in the health-care context) who require services for a better health outcome and guide them throughout their health-care journey to achieve a higher quality of life. The purpose of this study is to understand the progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (HMS) literature between 2018 and 2022, with a special emphasis on the pre- and post-Covid-19 periods.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors examine 885 HMS-related documents from the WOS database between 2018 and 2022 that were extracted using a keyword-based search strategy. After that, the authors present the descriptive statistics related to the corpus. Finally, the authors use author co-citation analysis (ACA) and bibliographic coupling (BC) techniques to examine the corpus.
Findings
The authors present the descriptive statistics as research themes, emerging sub-research areas, leading journals, organisations, funding agencies and nations. Further, the bibliometric analysis reveals the existence of five thematic clusters: Cluster 1: macroeconomic and demographic determinants of healthcare service delivery; Cluster 2: strategies in healthcare marketing; Cluster 3: socioeconomics in healthcare service delivery; Cluster 4: data analytics and healthcare service delivery; Cluster 5: healthcare product and process innovations.
Research limitations/implications
This study provides an in-depth analysis of the advancements made in HMS-related research between 2018 and 2022. In addition, this study describes the evolution of research in this field from before to after the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings of this study have both research and practical significance.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to use bibliometric analysis to identify advancements and trends in HMS-related research and to examine the pattern before and after Covid-19 pandemic.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad for providing the required support to conduct this study.
Author contributions: R.K. and A.W. conceived the presented idea. R.K. developed the theory, verified the analytical methods and performed the computations. R.K. and A.W. jointly discussed and interpreted the results and contributed to the final manuscript.
Funding: There are no funding sources to report.
Availability of data and materials: This study uses data from the Web of Science (WOS) and can be downloaded by following the steps provided in the methods section.
Declaration of conflicting interests: The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Copyright statement: The copyright of the study rests with the authors. The authors reserve all proprietary rights such as patent rights and the right to use all or part of the article in future works of their own, such as lectures, press releases and reviews of textbooks. In the case of republication of the whole, part or parts thereof, in periodicals or reprint publications by a third party, written permission must be obtained from either of the authors.
Since submission of this article, the following author has updated their affiliation: Anurag Wasnik is at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Citation
Kar, R. and Wasnik, A. (2024), "Progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (2018–2022): A descriptive and bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science (WOS) dataset", International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 325-349. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPHM-12-2022-0106
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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