Cancer nursing research output and topics in the first decade of the 21st century: results of a bibliometric and co-word cluster analysis.

OBJECTIVE Many countries carry a high cancer burden and comprehensive cancer nursing is becoming increasingly complicated and difficult. Summarizing the recent research focus on cancer nursing may provide a snapshot of this field for those nurses or nurse educators who are in need of a quick overview of the research and its utilization. METHODS Candidate publications from January 1st 2001 to March 31st 2011 were collected by searching PubMed with the MeSH word 'oncologic nursing' and without language restriction. Bibliometric techniques used in this study included a statistical analysis of publication counts by authors, countries and journals and a co-word cluster analysis of highly-frequent MeSH words. RESULTS A total of 2933 publications about cancer nursing from 246 journals were indexed in PubMed, with Oncology Nursing Forum identified as the top contributing journal in the field. The United States, the United Kingdom and Canada were the largest three producer countries about cancer nursing. A total of 34 highly-frequent MeSH words for more than 100 times' occurrences in the papers about oncologic nursing were extracted for cluster analysis. These words were classified into 3 aspects: (1) nursing practice; (2) nursing evaluation and education; (3) nursing-related social support. CONCLUSIONS Stable growth has occurred in the research field of cancer nursing. The limited amount of the publications from developing countries indicates that the field is still under-developed. Emerging topics of nurse-patient relations and social support provide some hints of the need to provide more target training for the nurses and nurse students in the field of cancer nursing.