key: cord-0524423-lr51475r authors: Vovsner, Helena Blavzun; Kokol, Peter; Zavrvsnik, Jernej; vZeleznik, Danica title: Content Analysis Application in Nursing: A Synthetic Knowledge Synthesis Meta-Study date: 2021-05-15 journal: nan DOI: nan sha: 391895c2d50f655114e8f4a6af7ce0da0145d362 doc_id: 524423 cord_uid: lr51475r Theoretical issues: With the explosive growth in the research literature production, the need for new approaches to structure knowledge emerged. Method: Synthetic content analysis was used in our meta-study. Results and discussion: Our meta-study showed that content analysis is frequently used in nursing research in a very wide spectrum of applications. The trend of its use is positive and it is used globally in a variety of research settings. The synthetic content analysis used in our study showed to be a very helpful tool in performing knowledge synthesis, replacing many of the routine activities of conventional synthesis with automated activities this making such studies more economically viable and easier to perform. With the explosive growth in the research literature production, the need for new approaches to structure knowledge emerged (Merton, 1985) . Capability to analyse vast amounts of publications on macroscopic and microscopic levels, together with domain independence classifies bibliometrics as one of such approaches (Tejasen, 2016) . Bibliometric was defined by Pritchard (1969) , as "the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication" and by Hawkins (2001) as "the quantitative analysis of the bibliographic features of a body of literature".Bibliometrics has become increasingly popular (Pesta, Fuerst & Kirkegaard, 2018) , especially in medical and nursing research (Kokol & Blažun Vošner, 2019; . Among almost 20000 bibliometric papers indexed in Scopus more than one third are from the medical and nursing fields. Another approach to deal with the explosive growth in the research literature production is knowledge synthesis. Knowledge synthesis roots dates back more than 120 years, however become more popular in the 1960s (Chalmers, Hedges & Cooper, 2002) , and even more commonly used toward the end of the millennia with the introduction of the evidence-based practice (Tricco, Tetzlaff & Moher, 2011; Whittemore et al., 2014) . One of the more popular knowledge synthesis methods especially in nursing is content analysis. Its main advantages are that it is content-sensitive, highly flexible, and can be used to analyse many types of data, either in inductive or deductive manner (Kyngäs, Mikkonen & Kääriäinen, 2020) . Triangulating bibliometrics and knowledge synthesis leads to the so called synthetic knowledge synthesis . The objective of our paper is present the outputs of a meta-study, in which we used synthetic content analysis to analyse the scope of application of content analysis in nursing. Thus, our aim was to identify the descriptive and spatial bibliometric patterns like trends, most prolific countries, institutions, source titles and themes. Synthetic content analysis was performed using the algorithm below: 1. Harvest the research publications concerning medical software quality to represent the content to analyse. 2. Condense and code the content using text mining. Authors keywords were selected as candidate codes, cause they most concisely present the content of a publication ) 3. Map the codes using bibliometric mapping and induce a clustered author keywords landscape. 4. Analyse the connections between the codes in individual clusters and map them into subcategories. 5. Identify interesting issues and the scope of categories (type of care, patient or illness) 6. Analyse sub-categories and label clusters with themes The search was performed in Web of Science Core Collection on January 17 th , 2021, for the period 2011-2020. We used the search string "Content analysis" limited to the Research Area = Nursing. The bibliometric mapping and text mining were performed using the VOSViewer software 1.6.15 (van Eck & Waltman, 2014). Number of the harvested publications was 5119. Among them there were 4903 original articles, 180 reviews, 26 conference papers, nine editorials and one correction. Figure 1 . Shows that during last ten years the number of papers steadily increased from 300 to 725, reaching the peak in 2019 with 805 papers. Most productive countries, organisations and source titles are presented in Tabel 1 to 3. As in most of other scientific disciplines the USA is the most productive country, and as usual in nursing, England and Scandinavian countries are among the top 10 most productive countries. Similarly, the organisation from those countries are also among the most productive ones. The papers are published in respected international journals mostly with high impact factors. The results of the synthetic content analysis is shown Figure 2 and Table 4 . Five themes emerged, ranging from long term and acute care, use of technology in nursing, education and quality of life. The content analysis was used for analysis of nursing care in wide spectrum of illness, from new-borns to elderly patients, almost all types of care and various health institution settings. It was mostly used in inductive manner. The content analysis was also as part of different other knowledge synthesis methods, for example Literature reviews (n=305), Systematic reviews (n=56), Integrative reviews (n=43) and Scoping reviews (n=10). Our meta-study showed that content analysis is frequently used in nursing research in a very wide spectrum of applications. The trend of its is positive and content analysis is used globally in a variety of research setting. The synthetic content analysis used in our study showed to be a very helpful tool in performing knowledge synthesis, replacing many of the routine activities of conventional synthesis with automated activities this making such studies more economically viable and easier to perform. 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