Applications of operations research and intelligent techniques in the health systems: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Operations research and quantitative methods, including the ones based on artificial or computational intelligence, have been applied in health care for decades. While looking at areas of applications and evolution of techniques one can notice trends, emerging problem areas, and also international disparities in the application-oriented research. Due to the scale of the problem, in this paper we explore these ideas by means of analysis of a limited, though comprehensive sample of the research results presented in the period 1985-2015 at annual conferences of the EURO Working Group Operational Research Applied to Health Services. The technical background for this research is a bibliometric analysis based on SciMAT—a Science Mapping Analysis software Tool, developed at the University of Granada.