Abstract
The use of information and communications technology (ICT) has revolutionized the way people communicate and interact with one another. While there is an extensive ICT utilization in a plethora of disciplines, an exploration of the specific field of health education poses significant implications. This chapter used bibliometric analysis to describe how ICT is applied in health education. Specifically, it followed a five-step workflow to achieve this goal. Among the key findings of this chapter is that ICT research on health education has been roughly stagnant in recent years. Most of the published health technology research is trending toward nursing, e-learning, social media, graduate and higher education, communication, and distance education. Western countries dominated the number of publications, and the USA remains the most productive country in this research area. Overall, this chapter provides an overview of the research landscape when it comes to the application of ICT in health education. Future research undertakings were offered to propel the health technology literature.
TopMain Focus Of The Chapter
There is extensive use of ICT in a plethora of disciplines, and it is noteworthy that an exploration of its potential implications for the specific field of health education could be reviewed using existing journal articles of sterling quality. While different research articles were published in various journals, and despite several literature reviews conducted, there is a need to explore the prevalence and patterns of the methodological bounds and trends of these papers using bibliometric and network analysis tools. Such inquiry was essential because the field of health education has been shaped by technological advances (Ortega-Navas, 2017; Rao & Mokhtar, 2023; Revano & Garcia, 2021; Tavares et al., 2023), and ICT has been essential for everyday participation (Garcia, Yousef, et al., 2023; Zonneveld et al., 2020). Therefore, reviewing existing journals published in a major bibliometric database would pave the way for the establishment of substantial inputs to further improve the health education programs of the various nations across levels and standards.
Key Terms in this Chapter
VOSviewer: A free software tool usually used for constructing and visualizing scientific data. 6. Scopus: A major indexing database for scientific research.
Gephi: An open-source software tool used for manipulating and visualizing networks that are comprised of a large dataset in real-time.
Information and Communications Technology: Technological tools used to assist, perform, share, and facilitate learning.
Network Visualization: The use of graphs to show connections and relationships among entities.
Bibliometric Analysis: A method used to analyze multiple documents using statistical and mathematical procedures.
Educational Technology: This refers to the technology-based media and tools used in the context of knowledge exchange, generation, and development.
Network Analysis: An approach to unravel patterns, visualize, and examine relationships among scientific documents using available metadata.
Health Education: A field of discipline that discusses the fundamental practices of informing people to live and choose healthy pursuits and can be contextual to the schools, community, society, and the medical and allied medical professions.
Health Technology: Also known as medical technology, refers to the application of technology and scientific advancements to the delivery of healthcare.