ArticleJournal of religion and health2026
The Marginalization of Spiritual Dimensions in Nursing Moral Injury Research: A Bibliometric Analysis, 2018-2025.
Article in Journal of religion and health, 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
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nursing moral injury research has expanded rapidly since 2020, yet the conceptual foundations and intellectual trajectories of this growth remain unexamined. This bibliometric study analyzed 179 publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (2018-2025) to map the conceptual evolution and intellectual foundations of nursing moral injury research, addressing two research questions: how have core concepts and thematic clusters evolved over time, and how has the co-citation knowledge base shifted across the study period? Keyword co-occurrence analysis with temporal overlay was performed via VOSviewer, and co-citation network analysis stratified across three pandemic-aligned periods was conducted via CiteSpace. The publication output increased fivefold between 2020 and 2021, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, and it remained stable during the postpandemic period. Conceptual analysis revealed three concept strata distinguishable by the average year of publication: from contextual scaffolding around trauma, ethics, stress, and pandemic through pandemic-driven empirical research on psychological symptomatology and occupational outcomes to an individualized framework centered on moral resilience, compassion fatigue, and moral courage, with spirituality entering the middle stratum but not persisting into the recent vocabulary and with institutional betrayal entirely absent from the network. Co-citation analysis revealed a knowledge base shifting from the dominance of military psychology to nursing-specific specialization. However, the bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework of Carey and Hodgson (2018) never became an established part of the nursing moral injury knowledge base: it surfaced only briefly and peripherally within the military moral injury cluster of 2020-2022, and was absent from the nursing moral injury literature networks thereafter. Taken together, these findings reveal a field that has grown in volume and scope without consolidating around a stable theoretical anchor. Future research may benefit from adopting the bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework as an organizing structure for nursing-specific conceptualization, measurement, and intervention design, building toward a theoretically grounded and disciplinarily coherent nursing moral injury research agenda.
Indexed as
Identifiers
42406300What 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.