Bibliometric Analysis

Studies were eligible if authors described them as qualitative or if they were classified as qualitative via MeSH or Emtree terms; only primary research was included. The review was a longitudinal bibliometric study covering 12 hospital-based subspecialties across three databases from January 2000 to December 2024. Geriatrics, palliative care, acute medicine, and nutrition/metabolic were excluded due to inconsistent database indexing or overlap with included fields. Reporting quality was assessed using the JBI Critical Appraisal Tool for Qualitative Research on a random sample of 100 studies each from neurology and nephrology, plus a stratified sample across all 12 fields. CINAHL and PsycINFO were excluded from the search because cross-platform automated deduplication was not feasible at the required scale.