Palliative care and ethics: a bibliometric review of the last 5 years

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a bibliometric review of articles published in the last 5 years on palliative care and ethics from the PubMed database. A bibliometric analysis of the texts was carried out, divided into two stages. At first, for all texts found, the following variables were evaluated: total number of articles, number of articles per year, publication language and origin of the journal, excluding only repeated studies. In the second stage, only the texts published in English, Spanish or Portuguese, and which were also a source of information on the specificity of the ethical theme under discussion, were included. A total of 250 articles were evaluated in the first stage. Regarding the language/idiom of the texts, there is a predominance of the English language. Considering the journals in which these texts were found, the 250 articles were distributed in 143 different titles. In relation to the distribution of journals by country, publications in journals from 24 countries were found. The second phase involved content analysis of 215 articles, as thematic categorical analysis, resulting in 8 categories and its subcategories. From the results, it was possible to conclude that, the use of the terms "palliative care / ethics" pointed to a production especially published in journals in Europe and in the United States of America, with a diversity of journals that presented at least one text with such approach in the studied period, also highlighting periodicals from specialized medical fields, such as some related to pain, to Pediatrics and to Bioethics, as well as predominance of focus on topics ranging from relational to legal and spiritual aspects.