The place of Turkish health tourism in the international platform: Bibliometric analysis

This study aims to investigate the impact of Turkey-originated publications on medical tourism, an increasingly prominent interest at the international level, and to propose recommendations regarding identified issues within this context. Initially, articles pertaining to medical tourism were scrutinized through a research conducted from Turkey in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. The VOSviewer, a data visualization tool, was employed for data evaluation, revealing patterns in information synthesis and underlying network relationships. In terms of the volume of publications related to medical tourism, the United States ranked first with 13,888 documents (32.839%), followed by the United Kingdom (n=4746, 11.222%), and Australia (n=3212, 7.595%), while Turkey ranked 18th with 660 publications. Among these, 538 (81.515%) were research articles. The first research article from Turkey on medical tourism was published in 1993. The majority of articles from Turkey on medical tourism (n=398, 73.977%) were published in 2015 or later. Publications between 2013 and 2022 were notably higher compared to other years and received the highest citations. Those published during 2013-2022 exhibited the highest H-index (33). Despite being among the leading countries globally in the field of medical tourism, Turkey's publication output in this domain, while seemingly increasing over the years, still falls significantly below the desired level. Hence, policymakers and scientific funding organizations should develop initiatives to encourage researchers in this field.