Previously submitted to: JMIR Serious Games (no longer under consideration since Jun 23, 2022)
Date Submitted: Oct 4, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
State of the Art and Trends in Research on Gamification and Serious Game in Health: A Scientometric Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
The application of gamification and serious games in health attracts much scholarly attention in the last decade. However, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of contributions of gamification and serious games to the growth of scientific research in the health domain.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to obtain insights into the current state and future directions of gamification and serious games in health by analyzing the related academic literature.
Methods:
This study collected papers related to gamification in health published in the last 10 years from Web of Science Core Collection database. Analyzing tools of CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to investigate the literature characteristics, including publications growth, related journal and disciplines, author collaboration, as well as impact articles and research trends.
Results:
A total of 1611 bibliographic records on gamification in health were included. Publications increased considerably with 45.9% at an annual compound average growth rate. Studies of gamification in health were conducted with multiple disciplines of knowledge from various journals. Some stable authors' collaboration is formed up. Five impactful papers are selected to reflect the research evolution. The research trends of the area are gamification in rehabilitation, medical education, mobile health, physical activity and mental health.
Conclusions:
Research of gamification in health is promising and drives towards meaningful healthcare practice and medical education. This study might provide potential implications for future research of gamification in health.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.