General, social, and intellectual structure of breastfeeding studies in the field of nursing: A bibliometric analysis on R software.

Abstract

Objective: This study aims to reveal the general, social, and intellectual structure of breastfeeding studies published in the field of nursing between 2014 and 2023 by using the bibliometric method.

Methods: A total of 2304 articles published in the last ten years were reached by searching the Web of Science database using the keywords "breastfeeding" and "breast feeding." Study data were analyzed on the open source R Studio software and the "biblioshiny for bibliometrix" package, an R software tool. Descriptive, cluster, and network analyses were performed.

Results: Of the articles, 10.46 % were single-author studies, the mean collaboration index was three, and the author footprint index was 0.22. The most cited article in the intellectual field had been published by Henshaw et al. in 2014. The word tree mapping yielded four basic concepts as a result of the evaluation of the word frequencies. The theme analysis indicated that advanced hotspots and the main topics discussed by the authors mainly included breastfeeding, lactation, breastfeeding support, and exclusive breastfeeding. The United States was the country with the highest number of publications and was effective in collaboration.

Conclusions: Breastfeeding studies in the field of nursing conducted in the last decade maintain their importance in the field.

Practical implications: Breastfeeding continues to be important in the field of nursing as well as maternal and infant health. The results of the study are expected to guide researchers, policy makers and program managers interested in the subject.