Health and Human Rights Nexus: A Bibliometric Analysis

This research aims to discover how human rights have been blended into health literature over time. The time frame of the reviewed literature was 1963 to February 2022. We retrieved the bibliometric dataset from Scopus. After compiling and processing the dataset, we finally got 5,458 documents on health and human rights issues. We used the open-source visualization software package Vos viewer 1.6.18 to process and analyze the data. The visualization focused on the top authors, most influential publications by citations, and most productive countries. The lexical network analysis shows that ‘public health’, ‘HIV/AIDS’, ‘mental health’, and ‘ethics’ are frequently associated words with ‘human rights’. The USA, UK, Canada, and Australia are the top four countries dominating the field. Collaboration among the developed nations is much higher than among world's developing countries. The University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Western Ontario are the top three organizations in Canada leading the research on health and human rights issues based on citations. However, if we consider publication's growth, the USA ranked first. Human rights have been perfectly blended in health literature, but a large gap exists in their spatial distribution and in making collaboration. A strong north-north and very weak south-south pattern in research collaboration are evident in visual effects that demand strong attention for future research.