Global output on artificial intelligence in the field of nursing: A bibliometric analysis and science mapping

Purpose: To analyze the AI research in the field of nursing, to explore the current situation, hot topics, and prospects of AI research in the field of nursing, and to provide a reference for researchers to carry out related studies. Methods: We used the VOSviewer 1.6.17, SciMAT, and CiteSpace 5.8.R3 to generate visual cooperation network maps for the country, organizations, authors, citations, and keywords and perform burst detection, theme evolution, and so forth. Findings: A total of 9318 articles were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Four hundred and thirty-one AI research related to the field of nursing was published by 855 institutions from 54 countries. CIN-Computers Informatics Nursing was the top productive journal. The United States was the dominant country. The transnational cooperation between authors from developed countries was closer than that between authors from developing countries. The main hot topics included nurse rostering, nursing diagnosis, nursing decision support, disease risk factor prediction, nursing big data management, expert system, support vector machine, decision tree, deep learning, natural language processing, and nursing education. Machine learning represented one of the cutting-edge and most applicable branches of artificial intelligence in the field of nursing, and deep learning was the hottest technology among many machine learning methods in recent years. One of the most cited papers was published by Burke in 2004 and cited 500 times, which critically evaluated AI methods to deal with nurse scheduling problems. Conclusions: Although AI has been paid more and more attention to the field of nursing, there is still a lack of high-yielding authors who have been engaged in this field for a long time. Most of the high contribution authors and institutions came from developed countries; therefore, more transnational and multi-disciplinary cooperation is needed to promote the development of AI in the nursing field. This bibliometric analysis not only provided a comprehensive overview to help researchers to understand the important articles, journals, potential collaborators, and institutions in this field but also analyzed the history, hot spots, and future trends of the research topic to provide inspiration for researchers to choose research directions.