Medical Tourism: Bibliometric Analysis and Directions for Further Research

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify the current state, dynamics, and structural characteristics of the development of scientific research in the field of medical tourism, as well as to determine promising directions for further scholarly inquiry based on a bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in the Scopus scientometric database. The study employs bibliometric and scientometric analysis, along with methods of systematization, generalization, and visualization of scientific data. To identify the thematic structure of research, the VOSviewer software was used, enabling the construction of keyword co-occurrence maps and the performance of cluster analysis. The empirical basis of the study consists of bibliographic records of scientific publications on medical tourism over a long time period. A stable upward trend in the number of scientific publications on medical tourism has been identified, particularly in the twenty-first century. The dominance of interdisciplinary research combining economics, tourism, management, healthcare, and social sciences has been revealed. Based on the results of the cluster analysis, four key scientific directions have been identified: institutional, regulatory, and medical aspects; marketing, consumer behavior, and service quality; analytical models, efficiency, and sustainable development; and emerging trends, including digitalization, artificial intelligence, and bibliometric research. An uneven geographical distribution of publications and a relatively low representation of Ukrainian research in the international scientific arena have been identified. The bibliometric analysis confirms the evolution of the scientific discourse on medical tourism from descriptive approaches to complex analytical and technologically oriented models. The relevance of further research in the areas of digital transformation, sustainable development, security challenges, and post-war recovery of medical tourism is substantiated. The obtained results can be used as a scientific basis for shaping industry development strategies and public policy in the field of medical tourism.