Visualization of Health Spirituality in Articles Published on Scopus Database

Abstract

Introduction: Spiritual health is one of the four pillars of health, and examining the state of scientific production in this field is crucial for informing scientific, educational, and research policies. One of the uses of visualization is to identify the interactions of scientific disciplines and research trends worldwide by analyzing published research documents. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the scientific relationships between spiritual health and other scientific fields, and to analyze the scientific cooperation network among authors, institutions, and countries in the field of spiritual health.

Methodology: The current research was a descriptive study with a scientometric approach utilizing data visualization methods. The statistical population of the study consisted of 3152 articles indexed in the Scopus citation database. The sample population, based on the inclusion criteria, comprised 1102 articles in the field of spiritual health from 2012 to March 2023. To search for articles using the keywords "spiritual practices," "spirituality AND health," "spiritual therapies," "spiritual healings," and "spirituality AND healing" was used. Raver Primap, NetDraw, U.C.I.Net and Vos Viewer software were used to illustrate, draw, and analyze cooperation networks. UCINET was used to calculate density and descriptive statistics.

Results: Based on the findings of the current research, six important topic clusters were identified in the field of spiritual health, with the clusters of "spirituality" and "cancer" ranking first. The keywords "spirituality," "religion-religiosity," "quality of life," and "depression" have the highest density in the co-occurrence network of words in the field of spiritual health. Among the countries of America, England, and Saudi Arabia, the one that exhibits the most indicators of centrality is the most effective in promoting the network of spiritual health. The spiritual health network, with a density index of authors (0.013), institutions and universities (0.0160), and countries (0.116), shows very low cohesion in cooperation networks regarding the issue of spiritual health.

Conclusion: The incoherent network structure observed in the scientific outputs in the field of spiritual health indicates that the full potential of scientific cooperation in this field has not been realized. There is a need for policy-making to promote increased research cooperation among researchers, countries, institutions, and universities worldwide. This will enable the utilization of tacit and mental knowledge, as well as the resources available in research centers, to enhance the growth and impact of spirituality on health.

Keywords: Spiritual health, Illustration, Scientific collaboration, Word co-occurrence, Scientometrics, Social network analysis