The Rise of Health Economics: Transforming the Landscape of Economic Research.

IF 2.4 3区医学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Health economics Pub Date : 2025-09-24 DOI:10.1002/hec.70044

Lorenz Gschwent, Björn Hammarfelt, Martin Karlsson, Mathias Kifmann

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Abstract

This paper explores the evolving role of health economics within economic research and publishing over the past 30 years. Historically, largely a niche field, health economics has become increasingly prominent, with the share of health economics papers in top journals growing significantly. We aim to identify the factors behind this rise. Using a combination of bibliometric methods and natural language processing (NLP), we classify abstracts to define health economics. Adapting NLP methods to evaluate the novelty, impact, and quality of academic papers, we demonstrate that the mainstreaming of health economics is driven by innovative, high-quality research, with two notable waves in quality ratings that highlight the emergence and impact of distinct subfields within the discipline. We find a strong positive correlation between citations and quality ratings, with health economics papers receiving fewer citations for their quality compared to other economics fields. Pandemic-related research received a high number of citations during 2020 and 2021; however, our findings indicate that this work was not systematically more novel or impactful than prior studies within the same subfield.

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卫生经济学的兴起：改变经济研究的格局。

本文探讨了卫生经济学在过去30年经济研究和出版中的演变作用。从历史上看，卫生经济学在很大程度上是一个利基领域，但随着卫生经济学论文在顶级期刊上的份额显著增长，它已变得越来越突出。我们的目标是找出这种增长背后的因素。采用文献计量学方法和自然语言处理（NLP）相结合的方法，我们分类摘要来定义卫生经济学。采用NLP方法来评估学术论文的新颖性、影响力和质量，我们证明了卫生经济学的主流化是由创新的、高质量的研究推动的，在质量评级方面有两个显著的浪潮，突出了该学科中不同子领域的出现和影响。我们发现引用次数与质量评级之间存在很强的正相关关系，与其他经济学领域相比，卫生经济学论文的质量被引用次数较少。2020年和2021年期间，与大流行相关的研究获得了大量引用；然而，我们的研究结果表明，这项工作并不比以前在同一子领域的研究系统地更新颖或更有影响力。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Health economics 医学-卫生保健

CiteScore

3.60

自引率

4.80%

发文量

177

审稿时长

4-8 weeks

期刊介绍： This Journal publishes articles on all aspects of health economics: theoretical contributions, empirical studies and analyses of health policy from the economic perspective. Its scope includes the determinants of health and its definition and valuation, as well as the demand for and supply of health care; planning and market mechanisms; micro-economic evaluation of individual procedures and treatments; and evaluation of the performance of health care systems. Contributions should typically be original and innovative. As a rule, the Journal does not include routine applications of cost-effectiveness analysis, discrete choice experiments and costing analyses. Editorials are regular features, these should be concise and topical. Occasionally commissioned reviews are published and special issues bring together contributions on a single topic. Health Economics Letters facilitate rapid exchange of views on topical issues. Contributions related to problems in both developed and developing countries are welcome.