Evaluating the Conceptual Development of Healthcare Leadership Literature with a Network Approach

Analysis of co-word networks can be used in discovering themes that reflect both the cognitive structure of the scientific field and the gap in the field, besides following the conceptual change in the scientific field. This study aims to reveal the development of the "healthcare leadership" literature, which started to attract more attention with the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors searched for all articles written in English between 2020 and 2023 in Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases with the key phrases “healthcare leadership”, “healthcare leader”, “health care leadership” or “health care leader” as the query to search the following fields within a record: Title, Abstract, and Author Keywords. 134 articles in the Web of Science database and 585 articles in the Scopus database were reached. Duplicate articles (271) were first eliminated, then articles with one keyword (12) were excluded since one keyword is not appropriate for network analysis. Consequently, 1,360 unique keywords of 2,372 keywords from 436 articles were entered into the analysis scope. A network of whole years was constructed based on word frequency co-occurrence matrices with keywords from all years included, besides a network for each year. Descriptive statistics such as network density, connected components, and total number of ties were calculated for the whole network. Centrality measures were calculated for the network of whole years and each year. Network density and number of the connected components were found as 0.012 and 27 respectively. Leadership, COVID-19/Pandemic, healthcare, healthcare leadership, qualitative research, and nurse were the first six concepts with the highest degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and eigenvector centrality for the network of whole years. Thus, it was possible to see both the general view of the cognitive structure of the healthcare leadership literature and conceptual change in the literature over the years. The findings have the potential to provide important clues for trends and future research directions in this field.