Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in health care: A bibliometric analysis

Decision support is a discipline that is becoming increasingly important in health care decision making. Many jurisdictions are exploring the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as a decision support framework. Indeed, health care decision makers still face complex choices while being urged to provide more comprehensiveness, structure, and transparency to the existing decision-making framework.This paper documents MCDA applications in health care and aims at identifying publication patterns as well as the range of topics to which MCDA have been applied. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis was conducted on articles reporting MCDA applications in health care published from 1960 to 2011. Articles identified through a literature search of health databases were categorized by year of publication, research topics, corresponding authors, country of residence of corresponding authors, and journal titles. The analysis of citation data was conducted in Matheo Analyzer 4.062. Over the time horizon of the analysis, the number of MCDA applications in health care has shown a significant and steady increase, with health care resource allocation being the most prevalent research topic. We also found that the top ten corresponding authors were responsible for 28% of the overall articles, with corresponding authors from the United States being the most prolific. The journal ‘Health Economics’ ranked first among the top ten journals. The results of this bibliometric analysis are concordant with the overall publication trends of MCDA methods described in other fields. Further research is needed, within jurisdictions, to select the most appropriate MCDA method to be applied to health care.