BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE LAST DECADE IN THE DESTINATION SELECTION OF MEDICAL TOURISTS FOR THE MEDICAL TOURISM MARKETING MANAGEMENT (2012-2021)

Abstract

It is a necessity that medical tourism researchers connect their research with medical tourism destinations to better understand and better effectively address them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the medical tourism studies that have investigated medical tourism destinations and their effects on patients as medical tourists in medical tourism marketing settings. This article extends a bibliometric review of published academic literature in medical tourism research that considers the medical tourism destination and patient destination choices. We began to develop the keywords for using the analytical framework of previous studies for bibliometrics analyses in January 2022. Then we conducted a pilot search in Web of Science using MeSH terms. A Boolean search of the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was performed to identify the medical tourists' choice of destinations research on the medical tourism market. Finally, we analyzed the results using bibliometrics and a data visualization software called VOSviewer to identify patterns in knowledge production and underlying network linkages in destination research on the subject. Our findings suggest that a notable part of medical tourism research explicitly addresses that consider the medical tourism destination and patient destination choices. A total of 503 authors have written articles published through 173 different publication sources that deal with the topic of destination selection of medical tourists in the medical tourism market. The countries that have done the most research on this subject have been the USA, England, Australia, Turkey, and Malaysia. This article extents a bibliometric review of published academic literature in medical tourism research that considers the medical tourism destination and patient destination choices. This bibliometric analysis is valuable for medical tourism marketing researchers who focus on generation research areas and useful for practitioners who desire to implement strategies to achieve a competitive advantage in the global medical tourism market.