A dashboard on Google Maps to show the most influential author on the topic of health behavior: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Background: Health behavior is an action taken by a person to maintain, attain, or regain good health and to prevent illness. As such, health behavior reflects a person's health beliefs and attracts many published papers in academics. However, who is the most influential author(MIA) remains unknown.Objective: The purpose of this study is to apply the algorithm of between centrality(BC) in social network analysis(SNA) to select the MIA on the topic of health behavior using the visual displays on Google Maps.Methods: We obtained 3,593 abstracts from Medline based on the keywords of (health[Title]) and (behavior[Title] or behavior [Title]) on June 30, 2018. The author names, countries/areas, and author-defined keywords were recorded. The BCs were applied to (1)select the MIA using SNA; (2)display the countries/areas distributed for the 1st author in geography, (3) discover the author clusters dispersed on Google Maps, and (4)investigate the keywords dispersed for the cluster related to the MIA on a dashboard. Pajek software was performed to yield the BC for each entity(or say node).Results: We found that the MIA is Spring, Bonnie(US). All visual representations that are the form of a dashboard can be easily displayed on Google Maps. The most influential country and the keywords are the US and health behavior. Readers are suggested to manipulate them on their own on Google Maps.  Conclusion: Social network analysis provides wide and deep insight into the relationships with the pattern of international author collaborations. If incorporated with Google Maps, the dashboard can release much more information regarding our interesting topics for us in academics. The research approach using the BC to identify the same author names can be applied to other bibliometric analyses in the future.