Global Health Issues and Trends in Nursing Research

Research is an indispensable element that shapes every profession and discipline. "Employ evidence-based research into practice" is one of the five core competences highlighted by the American Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2001 that all healthcare professionals should possess. With the development of evidence-based medicine, "Nursing research competence" has gradually become a core competence that all nurses must have. In light of the major demographic changes and multicultural social revolution underway worldwide, nursing research trends must be adapted to meet new, global challenges rooted in changing environmental, populational, geographical, and ethnic conditions. This paper analyzed the Web of Science database using VOSviewer and inputting the names of schools and departments as key words in consideration of QS rankings among European, American, and Asia regions for the years 2014 - 2018. Analyses of keywords, themes, and countries of international cooperation were conducted on 6333 original nursing articles published in journals indexed on the Science Citation Index (SCI) and/or Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The results indicate that the cooperation between scholars from Taiwan and scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China is relatively common. With regard to both global and Asia-specific research study trends, the top-five key words used to describe nursing research papers were health, care, depression, prevalence, and quality of life. The differences between Europe and the United States and Taiwan were the "risk, intervention, experience, adolescent" and "risk and impact" depicted by visual analysis. In addition, this research examined the themes of academic nursing conferences announced online for 2020, and found that a majority highlighted "nursing and healthcare" as a major theme. In twenty-two Chinese nursing journals indexed on the Huayi Online Database (2017-2020), geriatric nursing, long-term care and improvement in nursing care quality were the most commonly used research topics. In general, the aims of nursing research are to enhance the professional image and status of global nurses and to achieve the goals of global health. To create a better nursing research environment in Taiwan, nurses should improve their research abilities and cultivate cultural nursing sensitivity with the goals of maximizing the quality and quantity of research and of strengthening international cooperation, with the ultimate aim of enhancing the health and well-being of all. The international visibility of nursing in Taiwan must be increased to improve our international profile.