Clinical leadership in nursing in an ever-changing world: a bibliometric analysis.

Purpose: Leadership plays a critical role in improving the quality of care, minimizing risks to patients and staff and improving patient care outcomes. The purpose of this study is to analyze the structure of publications in the field of clinical leadership in nursing and to provide an overview of its development, trends and focus.

Design/methodology/approach: This study is descriptive bibliometric study. Data were collected from Web of Science on August 24, 2023. The population of the study consisted of 1,979 articles between 1994 and 2023 in the field of clinical leadership in nursing obtained from R Studio and WoS database.

Findings: The country where clinical leadership was most frequently studied was USA (n = 706). The most frequently used keywords by authors were leadership (843 times), nursing (329 times) and nurses (143 times). In the early years, the most frequently used trending topics were "quality," "culture," "change" and "leadership style," while in recent years the trending topics were "burnout" and "COVID-19."

Practical implications: Due to the limited knowledge on this subject, this study will make an important contribution to the literature and will shed light on new studies to be planned on clinical leadership.

Originality/value: It has been observed that the issue of clinical leadership in nursing has become even more important in recent years following radical changes in the world such as pandemics and disasters. It has been observed that studies on this subject have increased rapidly in recent years. While the topics of job satisfaction, burnout and Covid-19 were frequently studied, it was observed that mentoring, collaboration, organization of new graduate nurses, moral difficulties and clinical leadership in nursing education were studied more limitedly.