ReviewCureus2026
Communication Skills in Medical Education and Practice: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Current Research Landscape.
Review in Cureus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Communication skills are widely recognized as a core competency in medical education and clinical care, as they impact professional effectiveness, patient experience, and health outcomes. Over the past two decades, research in this area has expanded rapidly, creating the need for a comprehensive mapping of the field. To provide a global bibliometric analysis of research on communication skills in medical education and clinical practice published between 2000 and 2025, a systematic bibliometric search of PubMed (MEDLINE) and the Web of Science Core Collection was conducted for the period January 2000 to mid-2025. After deduplication and screening, 14,829 publications were included. Bibliometric indicators were analyzed using the Bibliometrix package in R and VOSviewer to evaluate publication trends, authorship patterns, journal impact, keyword co-occurrence, thematic evolution, and international collaboration networks. Annual publication output increased approximately 15-fold, from 86 publications in 2000 to 1,344 in 2025. Research was concentrated in a limited number of high-impact journals, led by Patient Education and Counseling, BMC Medical Education, Medical Teacher, and Medical Education. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Canada, and Australia emerged as dominant contributors, with increasing international collaboration over time. Keyword and thematic analyses identified four major clusters: clinician-patient communication and outcomes, medical education and assessment, communication in sensitive and high-stakes clinical contexts, and emerging digital and technology-mediated communication modalities. Research on communication skills has evolved into a mature, interdisciplinary, and globally distributed field. The findings demonstrate strong curricular integration, increasing methodological sophistication, and growing attention to digital transformation while also highlighting persistent geographic and contextual gaps that warrant further research and educational innovation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.