HEALTH AND SPIRITUALITY: RELEVANCE AND CHALLENGES OF RESEARCH

Resumen

Since the end of the 19th century, spirituality in health has been increasingly studied, especially in recent years. The degree of subjective understanding makes it possible to measure the extent to which bibliometric studies can be identified, thus increasing their importance as a fundamental element for health service users’ quality of health as well as improving the ambience and humanization in health. In this context, this research aimed to identify and present the main characteristics of the evolution of global research on spirituality and health. This is applied research with a quantitative and exploratory approach in which bibliometric analysis is done. The Web of Science, PubMed, Sage Journal, Scopus, and Scielo databases were utilized to search all fields of knowledge for studies with the theme of spirituality. We searched for categories with a focus on health and set the period as the initial year of the databases until July 2021. The results of mapping included the number of publications over the years, the number of publications by country and university and their networks, the categories of the most studied research, the authors, co-authors, and the most cited keywords and their relationship networks. Results indicated significant growth in health spirituality research, particularly in the years 2020 and 2021, as well as its main characteristics, thus proposing an effective contribution to understanding the state of the theme of spirituality as it is applied to health.