A Bibliometric Analysis of Death Education: Comparing Medical and Non-medical Research Perspectives

This paper presents a bibliometric survey of death education (DE) in medical and non-medical contexts. With information from WOS, 1043 papers were reviewed to assess publication patterns, thematic development, and methods. The findings suggest that medical-based DE research still holds sway - largely on end-of-life care and grief counselling - with non-medical DE untouched. In the post-2020 period, non-medical DE also took off as a way of approaching mortality in cultural, psychological, and existential terms, in the context of global catastrophes such as COVID-19. New approaches, such as noun-phrase-based co-word analysis, show cross-cutting trends and accelerated adoption of DE in schools and community settings. This research demonstrates that DE requires a more rounded and diverse education on emotional resilience and death literacy. We offer suggestions to increase DE's reach beyond the healthcare sector and encourage society's acceptance of mortality as an all-encompassing event.