JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

For medical education, studies about competency often explore the acquisition, performance, and evaluation of particular skills, knowledge, or behaviors that constitute physicians’ competency according to specific in role. Therefore, a more macroscopic analysis method is required to analyze the core competencies of doctors in society in this era.

Objective:

The purpose of this study is to analyze the research trends related to physician competency to reflect the social needs according to changes in the medical environment.

Methods:

The authors used topic modeling to identify potential research topics by analyzing data from research related to physician competency published between 2011 and 2020. The authors pre-processed 1,354 articles and extracted 272 keywords.

Results:

The terms that appeared most frequently in research related to physician competency since 2010 were, in order, “knowledge,” “hospital,” “family,” “job,” “guideline,” “management,” and “communication.” The terms that appeared in most studies were “education,” “model,” “knowledge,” and “hospital.” Topic modeling revealed that the main topics about physician competency included “Evidence-based clinical practice,” “Community-based healthcare,” “Patient care,” “Career and self-management,” “Continuous professional development,” and “Communication and cooperation.” We divided the studies into four periods (2011–2013; 2014–2016; 2017–2019; and 2020–2021) and performed a linear regression analysis. The result showed the change in topics by period. The “hot topics,” which show increased interest among scholars over time, included “Community-based healthcare,” “Career and self-management,” and “Continuous professional development.”

Conclusions:

Based on the analysis of research trends, it is forecasted that physicians’ professionalism and community-based medicine will continue to be studied in future research on physician competency.