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Comprehensive exploration of urban health by bibliometric analysis: 35 years and 11,299 articles

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Abstract

This paper aims to evaluate the health issues related to urbanization and get an overview of urban health with the bibliometric approach, the powerful tool in quantitatively macroscopic analysis across multiple disciplines. A total of 11,299 articles and 5,579 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms from the year 1978–2012 were retrieved by searching PubMed/MEDLINE using MeSH term “urban health”. The bibliographic information was analyzed to summarize the overall research characteristics. MeSH terms were sorted by their normalized frequency. Top 10 % of the high-frequency MeSH terms were classified into categories (physical environment, health effects, social environment and counter-measures) and analyzed. We investigated the themes and their tendency of the corresponding categories by co-occurrence word (co-word) and regression analysis. We concluded and elaborated nine themes of physical environment, ten themes of health effects, three themes of social environment and four themes of counter-measures in urban health, as well as the main themes in five representative countries (USA, India, China, South Africa and Japan). We present a data-based overview of the issues in urban health, as reference for further researchers.

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Acknowledgments

This study is supported by grants from Basic Research Foundation of Institute of Medical Information & Library, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College (CAMS & PUMC) (No. 12R0113), PUMC Youth Fund and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 3332013087) to Xiaofeng Jia. All the authors declare that they have no financial interest in the findings of this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Medical Information & Library, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College (CAMS & PUMC), No. 3 Yabao Road, Beijing, 100020, China

    Xiaofeng Jia & Tao Dai

  2. Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, Peking University School of Public Health, Beijing, China

    Xinbiao Guo

Authors
  1. Xiaofeng Jia
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  2. Tao Dai
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  3. Xinbiao Guo
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Correspondence to Tao Dai.

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Jia, X., Dai, T. & Guo, X. Comprehensive exploration of urban health by bibliometric analysis: 35 years and 11,299 articles. Scientometrics 99, 881–894 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1220-4

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