JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in inverted classroom teaching (ICT) and its various forms within the education sector. Physiology is a core course that bridges basic and clinical medicine, and inverted classrooms teaching in physiology (ITP) has been sporadically practiced to different extents globally. However, students and teachers' response and feedback to ITP are diverse, and the effectiveness of modified ITP integrated into regular teaching is difficult to assess objectively and quantitively.

Objective:

This study aimed to explore the current status and development direction of ITP in basic medical education by the bibliometric visual analysis.

Methods:

This paper conducted a bibliometric analysis of ITP literature published between 2000 and 2023 using CiteSpace, a bibliometric visualization tool, based on the Web of Science (WOS) database. Moreover, an in-depth review was conducted to summarize ITP's application worldwide, hot spots, and development trends.

Results:

A total of 42 studies were included in the study, with the year 2013 marks the commencement of the field. The bibliometric analysis shows that university staff and doctors in the affiliated hospital are the core authors, with several research teams forming cooperative relationships and developing their research characteristics. The development of ITP could be divided into several stages: the introduction stage (2013-2014), the extensive practice stage (2015-2019), and the modification and growth stage (2020-2023). Gopalan Chaya has the highest citation count with 5 publications, who has published 14 relevant papers since 2016, with a significant surge from 2019 to 2022. Author collaboration is generally limited, and most academic work was conducted in independent teams with little cross-team communication. American authors published the most ITP papers (18 in total, accounting for over 43% of the total papers), and their intermediary centrality is 0.24, indicating strong connections both at home and abroad. Chinese authors ranked second by publishing eight papers, but their intermediary centrality is only 0.02, suggesting limited international influence and lower overall quality. The topics of ITP research has been multifaceted, covering active learning, autonomous learning, student performance, teaching effect, blended teaching, and others.

Conclusions:

This paper has presented a comprehensive overview of the history, development process, and future direction of ITP for Physiology colleagues, which may strengthen academic exchanges and cooperation at home and abroad, promote the diversification and teaching effectiveness of ITP through building academic communities to jointly train more and more excellent medical talents for the country and the world.