Clinical Social Work and Healthcare Integration: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Thematic Evolution over Two Decades

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and thematic evolution analysis of scholarship at the intersection of clinical social work and healthcare from 2006 to late 2025. Based on 15,885 publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, the analysis employs Bibliometrix and VOSviewer to examine publication trends, keyword co-occurrence patterns, collaboration networks, and thematic trajectories using bibliographic metadata (titles, keywords, and abstracts). The results indicate sustained growth in research output over two decades, reflecting the increasing integration of clinical social work into healthcare research and practice. Core thematic clusters—including social work, healthcare, mental health, palliative care, and patient care—underscore the profession’s combined focus on psychosocial intervention and systemic service delivery. Thematic evolution analysis indicates a shift from earlier emphases on allied health and occupational therapy toward more recent priorities, including mental health crises, interprofessional education, health equity, and digital health. COVID-19 emerges as a major thematic inflection point, highlighting its substantial impact on healthcare systems and social work practice, while the appearance of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT signals growing scholarly engagement with technological, ethical, and policy challenges. Conceptual structure mapping further identifies education, communication, and social support as cross-cutting dimensions linking micro-level practice to macro-level healthcare reform. The findings provide an integrated overview of the field’s intellectual development and offer analytically grounded insights relevant to research, education, and policy discussions on integrated and equitable healthcare systems.