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. 2023 May 29;10(8):4907–4918. doi: 10.1002/nop2.1798

Research status, hotspots and trends on oral care research in the elderly published from 2002 to 2022: A bibliometric analysis – A review article

Jingwen Zhang 1, Yanqiu Weng 1,2, Mengting Qiao 1, Wenyao Chen 1,2, Lingjuan Zhang 1,2,✉
PMCID: PMC10333827  PMID: 37247336

Abstract

Aims

The aim of this study was to analyse the status, hotspots and trends of research on oral care for the elderly in mainland China in the past 20 years through bibliometrics, which aims to provide new ideas and targets for future clinical work and research.

Design

Bibliometric analysis.

Methods

Relevant literature was retrieved from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, China Science and Technology Journal Database, Web of Science and PubMed. NoteExpress, Co‐Occurrence and CiteSpace were used to analyse bibliometric features in terms of year of publication, journal of publication, authors, institution and keywords.

Results

A total of 716 related articles were obtained. The number of publications shows an increasing trend over time, only 2017–2021; 309 papers were published, accounting for 43.2% of the total number of publications. A total of 238 articles were published in Science Citation Index journals or Chinese core journals, accounting for 33.2% of the total number of articles. The study of oral health‐related quality of life in the elderly is a hot research topic. There is a lack of research on the elderly living in elderly care facilities.

Keywords: bibliometric analysis, China, elderly, nursing, oral care

1. INTRODUCTION

Population ageing is one of the significant social transformations of the 21st century which poses healthcare challenges for caregivers and creates an enormous global burden in social economy. As reported in China's seventh National Census on 12 May 2021, the population aged 60 and over is 264 million, constituting 18.70% of the total population, of which the population aged 65 and over is 191 million, accounting for 13.50% of the national total population (Tu et al., 2021). It is expected that there will be 365 million aged 65+ Chinese by 2050, a number representing 26.1% of the country's total population. In addition, of this ageing population, 115 million are expected to reach the age of 80 and 0.6 million are expected to become centenarians (Fang et al., 2020).

According to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, approximately 3.58 billion people suffer from cases of oral conditions worldwide. Oral health problems remain a major neglected global public health challenge (Collaborators et al., 2020). Among the most common oral diseases are dental caries, periodontal disease, tooth loss, etc., the ages between 60 and 64 tend to be peak age for having severe periodontitis. Nearly 180,000 deaths occur each year due to lip and oral cavity cancers, which rank among the top 15 most common cancers in the world (Peres et al., 2019). Based on the data from the 4th National Oral Health Epidemiological Survey in mainland China, the prevalence of dental caries in the 65–74 age group is 98%, 90.7% had periodontal disease, including bleeding gums (82.6%), calculus (90.3%), and deep pockets (14.7%). The periodontal health and oral hygiene status of the elderly decreased significantly. The overall oral health status is not optimistic, and residents' awareness of oral health still needs to be enhanced (Fang et al., 2020; Jiao et al., 2021).

It is well documented that the prevalence and severity of oral diseases are consistently associated with socioeconomic status. In many low‐income and middle‐income countries, oral diseases are largely untreated due to the high cost of treatment. Besides, the lack of professional dental staff and the financial burden also exacerbate inequalities in the distribution of dental care (Peres et al., 2019). Unlike preventive‐orientated dental care in some developed countries, Chinese residents seek oral health care only when oral diseases cause pain, reflecting their relatively low real demand for dental services and do not see it as critical (Li & Yao, 2021). According to a survey, only 19% of Chinese elderly have seen a dentist within a year (Liu et al., 2016). There are many underlying diseases in the elderly. Their oral health status will decline with the increase of age, including decreased periodontal support, tooth loss, and loss of elastic fibres etc., which partly reflects the social demand for oral care (Belibasakis, 2018; Li & Yao, 2021). A survey took place in mainland China has revealed that there are several risk factors contribute to the high prevalence of oral diseases among the elderly, including the scarcity of oral health knowledge, the low frequency of daily hygiene behaviours, and the inadequacy of oral care services. The average awareness rate of dental health among the elderly was 47.6%. It is estimated that only 30.1% of the elderly brush their teeth twice daily and only 0.8% of the elderly use dental floss (Lu et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2020). Untreated oral diseases can lead to substantial outcomes, which may include malnutrition, Infective endocarditis, impaired masticatory function, diabetes, decreased quality of life and affected social relationships etc. In recent years, Oral health has been written into the blueprint of “Healthy China 2030” (Chen et al., 2019).

In China, hospitals are classified into three levels according to their scale, scientific research direction, technical and talent strength, medical hardware equipment, etc., and each level is subdivided into A, B, and C. Primary hospital is a primary healthcare institution which directly provides the community with medical, prevention, rehabilitation and comprehensive healthcare services. The secondary hospital is a regional hospital that provides comprehensive medical and health services to multiple communities and undertakes certain teaching and scientific research tasks. The tertiary hospital provides medical and health services across regions, provinces, cities, and the whole country is a medical prevention technology centre with integrated medical care, teaching and scientific research capabilities. The internal nursing management organization system of the hospital implements the three‐level nursing management system of the head of the nursing department – supervisor of nursing care – the head nurse. The nursing department is the functional department of nursing management in the hospital, responsible for the management of nursing quality, nursing staff, nursing research and teaching in the hospital. Under the leadership of the head of the nursing department and the professional guidance of relevant department directors, the supervisor of nursing care is responsible for the nursing business and administrative management of the department and develops nursing plans and scientific research plans in combination with the situation of the department. The ward management implements the head nurse responsibility system, the head nurse is responsible for the ward nursing work, formulating the work plan and organizing the implementation. For the elderly inpatients with oral problems who have lost their ability to take care of themselves, the responsible nurse will provide oral care services for them, using disposable oral care kits for morning and evening care and record.

Bibliometrics was first proposed by British intelligence scientist Pritchard in 1969. It is a quantitative analytic technique based on a range of characteristics of literature, such as the number of articles, authors, institutions, year of publication and keywords etc. Bibliometrics uses mathematical and statistical methods to reveal research status and development trends in certain areas of research. In recent years, there has been widespread use of it in nursing research (Dong et al., 2020; Kantek & Yesilbas, 2020).

Relevant stakeholders must increase their efforts to address the oral health needs of the elderly. In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the oral health problems of the elderly in mainland China, the number of studies focusing on oral care for the elderly is increasing year by year, and many research papers have been published in journals. However, research status and hot spots on oral care in the elderly in mainland China are rarely reported. Therefore, in order to fill this gap, we conducted a bibliometric analysis to probe into the research status, hotspots and future trends of oral care research focusing on the elderly in mainland China, for providing reference for the continuous promotion and improvement of this field.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1. Data sources and study selection

First, we searched articles published in three Chinese databases including China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang and China Science and Technology Journal Database (VIP) from January 01, 2002, to May 20, 2022, with the subject terms “aged” AND “oral cavity” AND “nursing.” Inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) Chinese language; (2) literature published from January 01, 2002, to May 20, 2022; (3) studies relevant to oral care in the elderly in mainland China. Exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) literature without keywords; (2) non‐nursing literature; (3) conferences, announcements, dissertations and other publications. Second, article searches were conducted in Web of Science databases and PubMed with “elderly OR elders OR elderly people OR aged OR older adults” AND “oral cavity OR dental OR mouth” AND “care OR nursing OR nurse OR nursing care” AND “China or Chinese” as the subject terms. Inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) English language; (2) literature publication year from January 01, 2002, to May 20, 2022; (3) studies relevant to oral care in the elderly; (4) authors were from mainland China and the studies were conducted in mainland China. We excluded articles that did not meet the inclusion criteria, and conferences, patents and other publications.

2.2. Data analysis

NoteExpress 3.5.0.9054 software was used to establish a literature reading database. Imported all bibliographies of retrieved Chinese and English articles into NoteExpress, using “Data Import/Export‐Remove Duplicate” function to remove duplicate literature, and filtered the literature by reading titles, abstracts and keywords. Then, we exported the retained article bibliographies to Microsoft Office Excel 2019. COOC 12.6 (Xue & Wen, 2004) is a bibliometric and scientific graphing software package developed by the Chinese XueShuDianDi Team. We created a new sheet in Excel that only contains author information, and used COOC to extract data from the sheet to plot the author distribution chart. CiteSpace (Chen, 2004) was developed by Dr. Chaomei Chen of Drexel University to visualize bibliometric analysis, which is based on JAVA programming language and is widely used to analyse the hotspots and new trends in a research field. It uses bibliometrics method and data mining algorithm integration to draw a visualization map and establish the association between nodes to analyse the co‐occurrence relationship and co‐citation relationship among research objects.

In this study, COOC was used to convert the format of Chinese language articles which can be recognized and analysed in CiteSpace. All English language publications data were sent to citation manager in PubMed, stored in NBIB format in input folder, next converted to Web of Science format that can be recognized in CiteSpace. Taking “Institution” as the network node, run it to get the network of research institutions. Each node represents one issuing institution, the connecting lines between nodes represent cooperation between institutions. Setting “Keyword” as the network node type to conduct bibliometric analysis. CiteSpace was configured with the following parameters: time from January 2002 to May 2022, years per slice for 1 year. Other parameters were set to default values. CiteSpace automatically generated visualization plots based on the node selection and adjusted the nodes within the visualization window as necessary.

3. RESULTS

3.1. Annual distribution of publications

The process of data selection is shown in Figure 1. Of the 7073 articles preliminary screened, a final analysis of 716 articles was conducted. As seen in Figure 2, it shows the details of temporal distribution and trends of oral care in the elderly in mainland China over the past two decades. There is generally an upward trend in the volume of Chinese‐language articles, among which the number of articles published in 2018 reached a peak of 70, accounting for 9.8% of all literature. In contrast, the overall publication volume of English‐language publications tends to be stable and low, with the first article published in 2008. The data in 2022 cannot reflect the publication of the whole year.

FIGURE 1.

FIGURE 1

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Flow chart for article selection.

FIGURE 2.

FIGURE 2

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Annual number of articles published in Chinese and English on the study of oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

3.2. Distribution of journals and authors

The 716 papers were published in a total of 240 journals, including 28 nursing journals, taking up 11.7%. All 19 English language literature were published in Science Citation Index journals. 219 Chinese language articles were published in 76 kinds of Chinese core journals, occupying 30.6% of the total literature. Table 1 shows the top 10 journals publishing oral care literature for the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022, of which only a few are core journals. 716 articles involving a total of 1452 authors, of which the author with the largest number of articles was Qiwei Gong, who published 7 articles in total, accounting for 1.0% of the total number of articles. Figure 3 shows the Nightingale Rose Chart of the distribution of the top 20 authors of both Chinese and English literature.

TABLE 1.

Top 10 journals with the highest number of published articles.

No. Journal Number Percentage, %
1 Electronic Journal of General Stomatology 41 5.7
2 Chinese Journal of Geriatric Dentistry 36 5.0
3 China Health Care Nutrition 28 3.9
4 Modern Nurse 19 2.7
5 Guide of China Medicine 16 2.2
6 Journal of Qilu Nursing 13 1.8
7 Health Guide 13 1.8
8 Medical Information 13 1.8
9 World Latest Medicine Information 12 1.7
10 Nursing Journal of Chinese People's Liberation Army 11 1.5
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FIGURE 3.

FIGURE 3

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Nightingale rose chart of the distribution of the top 20 authors of Chinese (Left) and English literature (Right).

3.3. Distribution of issuing institutions

Figures 4 and 5 depict the map of institutional networks of Chinese and English literature, respectively. The analysis of addresses shows that 14 papers lack authors' addresses so only 702 papers are used in this section.

FIGURE 4.

FIGURE 4

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Distribution of Chinese‐language institutional publications of oral care research in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

FIGURE 5.

FIGURE 5

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Distribution of English‐language institutional publications of oral care research in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

In Figure 4, the top three Chinese language publishing institutions are the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army (published 18 articles, accounting for 2.5% of the total), the Affiliated Stomatological Hospital of Nanjing Medical University (published 10 articles, accounting for 1.4% of the total) and the Affiliated Stomatological Hospital of Medical School of Nanjing University (published 7 articles, accounting for 1.0% of the total), respectively. The rest institutions have one to six publications.

In Figure 5, the top three English language publishing institutions are School of Nursing, Fudan University (published 4 articles, accounting for 0.6% of the total), West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University (published 2 articles, accounting for 0.3% of the total) and Hospital of Stomatology, Guanghua College of Stomatology, Sun Yat‐Sen University (published 2 articles, accounting for 0.3% of the total), respectively. Besides, research collaborations have been conducted by some mainland Chinese institutions with international institutions, such as Rory Meyers College of Nursing New York University, Duke University School of Nursing and College of Dental Science, and Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. According to the time bar at the top of Figure 5, School of Nursing, Fudan University has been cooperating with other institutions since 2015, which means it is an active cooperative institution in the field of oral care research in the elderly.

3.4. Keywords co‐occurrence

Table 2 and Figure 6 show the top 20 high‐frequency keywords and the co‐occurrence graph of keywords in articles published in Chinese language on oral care for the elderly from 2002 to 2022, respectively. Based on the frequency and centrality of keyword co‐occurrences, “oral care,” “oral health education” and “tooth extraction” were the hot keywords in Chinese language publications. In addition, in Figure 6, the colour of annual rings corresponds to the timeline at the top of the figure, although the diameter of the annual ring of periodontitis, mental nursing, quality of life and oral health care is small, the outer ring is orange, which indicates that these keywords are receiving more and more attention in recent years.

TABLE 2.

Distribution of the top 20 high‐frequency keywords in Chinese language publications.

No. Keyword Frequency Centrality
1 the elderly 152 0.12
2 elderly patients 133 0.21
3 nursing 128 0.16
4 oral care 97 0.55
5 old age 95 0.11
6 mental nursing 48 0.16
7 nursing intervention 32 0.08
8 tooth extraction 31 0.24
9 oral health education 28 0.3
10 oral health 28 0.2
11 prosthodontics 28 0.09
12 periodontitis 25 0.05
13 oral 23 0.19
14 oral cancer 22 0.07
15 quality of life 21 0.06
16 oral health care 19 0.04
17 oral disease 18 0.12
18 diabetes 17 0.42
19 perioperative period 15 0.31
20 Complete denture 14 0.04
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FIGURE 6.

FIGURE 6

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Keywords co‐occurrence graph of articles published in Chinese language on oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

Table 3 and Figure 7 show the top 6 high‐frequency keywords and the co‐occurrence graph of keywords in articles published in English language on oral care for the elderly from 2002 to 2022, respectively. It can be seen by combining the frequency and centrality of keyword co‐occurrence that the hot keywords in English language publications were “risk factor,” “tooth loss,” “oral health,” “quality of life” and “older adult.”

TABLE 3.

Distribution of the top 6 high‐frequency keywords in English language publications.

No. Keyword Frequency Centrality
1 oral health 6 0.24
2 older adult 6 0.13
3 tooth loss 4 0.27
4 quality of life 3 0.25
5 risk factor 2 0.28
6 dental status 2 0.01
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FIGURE 7.

FIGURE 7

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Keywords co‐occurrence graph of articles published in English language on oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

3.5. Burst terms

Figure 8 shows the top 20 keywords with the strongest citation burst in both Chinese and English language published articles on oral care in the elderly in mainland China. In Chinese language publications, the burst keywords in the beginning included “the elderly,” “nursing,” “tooth extraction,” and “oral disease.” Burst keywords including “periodontitis,” “nursing efficacy,” “influence factor,” “quality of life,” “satisfaction,” “high quality nursing” and “oral health” have been bursting since 2018, of which the keywords of “periodontitis,” “nursing efficacy” and “influence factor” have a long burst time of 5 years. It is worth noting that the burst intensity of “quality of life” reached 6.22, indicating that the oral health‐related quality of life of the elderly has received the highest attention and is a hot research area. In English language publications, “tooth loss” burst the earliest and lasted the longest, plus the burst intensity, verifying its importance and popularity during 2008 to 2015. “Quality of Life” has continued to burst with the highest intensity since 2021, which is consistent with the conclusion drawn from data of Chinese language publications.

FIGURE 8.

FIGURE 8

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Keyword burst graph of articles published in Chinese (Left) and English language (Right) on oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

3.6. Keywords time zone diagram

Figure 9 shows the distribution of keywords over time in Chinese language articles, it can be seen that there are different concerns in different periods. Hence, the evolution of oral care research for the elderly in mainland China can be divided into three development stages: basic initial stage, prosperous stage and new stage.

FIGURE 9.

FIGURE 9

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Keywords time zone diagram in articles published in Chinese on oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

Basic initial stage (2002–2003): At this stage, oral care research for the elderly was in the initial development stage, and the research was messy and not systematic.

Prosperous stage (2004–2014): During this period, the study of oral care for the elderly gradually increased, and the research direction began to diversify. Researches were approximately spread out from the aspects of mental nursing, health education, oral health‐related quality of life, oral nursing intervention etc.

New stage (2015–): In this phase, the research of oral care for the elderly is gradually deepening and meticulous in mainland China. During this period, mental nursing, health education and oral care intervention are still issues that need to be concerned. However, different from the past, in‐depth analysis of its research problems has been done in the new era. That is to say, from the perspectives of satisfaction, application effect and compliance etc., the improvement situation of various nursing interventions on oral health and oral health‐related quality of life of the elderly is specifically explored.

Figure 10 shows the distribution of keywords over time in English language articles. The research on oral care in the elderly started relatively late, the first English literature was published in 2008, there was a period of stagnation between 2011 and 2015, we divided the study into two stages for analysis.

FIGURE 10.

FIGURE 10

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Keywords time zone diagram in articles published in English on oral care in the elderly in mainland China from 2002 to 2022.

Phase 1 (2008–2011): In this phase, a total of three articles were published, and the research content was relatively scattered.

Phase 2 (2015–): In this phase, the number of published papers has increased significantly, and research contents have become more abundant, focusing not only on the oral health problems of the elderly but also on the nutritional status, masticatory function, cognitive dysfunction and quality of life of the elderly, comprehensively discuss the field of oral care for the elderly in a multi‐dimensional and multi‐level way.

4. DISCUSSION

In China, oral care is a basic nursing technology with high frequency of use, and it is a basic skill that every nurse must master in clinical practice. Pathological changes may occur in the oral environment of the elderly due to ageing, physiological function decline, polypharmacy and other reasons. Therefore, scientific and standardized oral care, as the most basic nursing measure, is an effective way to improve the oral health of the elderly. It can reduce the risk of infection, restore oral function, maintain oral cleanliness, reduce complications, promote comfort and improve the elderly's oral health awareness, which is of great significance for maintaining oral health, preventing diseases and promoting rehabilitation.

The results of this paper showed that the research content of published articles is varied. For example, some scholars have constructed sensitive index of nursing quality in elderly oral outpatient department, some scholars have constructed oral care programs for elderly patients with oral cancer during perioperative period based on Delphi method, some scholars have summarized the best evidence on oral management for the elderly. Other researches mainly involve comprehensive nursing intervention, mental nursing, and oral health education etc. for the elderly suffering from oral cancer or periodontitis and other diseases. For example, the application of high‐quality nursing, continuous nursing, integrated medical and nursing mode, clinical nursing pathways and comfortable nursing to improve oral health outcomes and oral health‐related quality of life of elderly patients. It is worth noting that “quality of life” is a hot research field in both Chinese and English literature. In recent years, there are also many international scholars have carried out researches on oral health‐related quality of life of the elderly (Baniasadi et al., 2021; Iosif et al., 2021; Koistinen et al., 2020; Sekundo et al., 2021), which represents a new trend in future research. However, there were only 3 papers focused on the elderly living in elderly care facilities, only accounting for 0.4% of the total published papers. The elderly who live in elderly care facilities for a long time are at greater risk of oral diseases due to cognitive dysfunction, comorbidity and terminal palliative state. Oral health care for the elderly in elderly care facilities is generally inadequate worldwide (Bianco et al., 2021; Girestam Croonquist et al., 2020), research has shown that older adults with cognitive dysfunction are becoming the main body of elderly care facilities accompanied by chronic psychiatric and behavioural abnormalities (Chen et al., 2021). Hence, it may be considered to shift the research focus to oral care for the elderly living in elderly care facilities in the future, and standardized assessment of oral health knowledge, attitude and behaviour, in combination with the current situation of oral health of the elderly, to explore a comprehensive nursing intervention that is suitable for the clinical situation in accordance with mainland China's national conditions and can improve the oral health outcome of the elderly in elderly care facilities scientifically and effectively. In elderly care facilities in China, for patients with natural teeth, brush their teeth at least twice a day with fluoride toothpaste for more than 3 min each time, and periodically evaluate the oral condition according to the patient's needs. For elderly patients with complete or partial dentures, daily oral care is provided, such as brushing teeth and removal of food debris. The nurse is responsible for the daily denture cleaning and soaking. In addition, nurses assist patients with oral exercises, oral self‐care and salivary gland massage, stimulate salivary glands and improve oral salivary secretion rate through muscle movement of head, neck, face and tongue. Different from inpatient care, for the elderly at home, nurses are mainly responsible for providing oral health education for them and their caregivers, teaching them to correctly implement oral care and visiting them regularly. If necessary, the community nurse can also provide on‐site guidance.

Judging from the year of publication, mainland Chinese researchers began researching oral care for the elderly in 1998, while international scholars have been conducting research on this subject since the 1950s (Ciebien, 1958; Pliskin & Langer, 1959; Sheldon, 1959). Although the number of articles on oral care for the elderly is increasing year by year in mainland China, the number of articles published in the English databases is far less than the number in the Chinese databases nevertheless. More than half of the articles are published in non‐core journals, scholars do not pay enough attention to the academic influence of articles. Based on this, it is important that scholars should pay attention to strengthening scientific research exchanges and cooperation with international institutions, achieve the globalization of scientific research, strive to create more opportunities for sharing research results with international scientific colleagues to enhance China's global influence in the field of oral care for the elderly.

Cooperative research is a kind of research method with complementary advantages. On the one hand, a high rate of co‐author and degree of cooperation can reflect the good spirit of cooperation among authors. On the other hand, it can also reflect the degree of interdisciplinary intersection of the papers, the breadth of the fields involved and the depth of academic research (“Research collaborations bring big rewards: the world needs more,” 2021). The results of this study show that most of the institutions publishing literature are located in developed regions such as Guangdong Province, Beijing, Jiangsu Province and Shanghai, with large differences between regions and only a few cooperative networks are formed. This kind of barriers to cooperation may affect the further development of research. Therefore, breaking the regional restrictions, strengthening the academic exchanges between different regions, supporting the common progress of areas where oral care for the elderly is backward, and improving the oral health status of the elderly are the problems that need to be solved urgently at present.

According to a study investigating access to dental care among the elderly in China (Li & Yao, 2021), a significant difference was found between patients with rural resident insurance and lower socioeconomic levels and those with urban resident insurance and higher socioeconomic levels, this kind of separation of the dental system from other healthcare systems is similar to the situation in the United States (Fang et al., 2020). Therefore, in the future, the proportion of the uninsured should be further reduced, the dental care infrastructure should be improved, and the provision of affordable dental care for the elderly should be ensured.

5. LIMITATIONS

The limitations of this study are as follows. Firstly, this study only searched the published literature on oral care research in the elderly in mainland China collected from various databases over the past 20 years. Since the first article was published in 1998, the findings of this study cannot comprehensively reflect the development process of this field. Secondly, we conducted a general orientation analysis of the included papers, but without a more in‐depth content analysis. The research types, research quality, methods, and research findings of those articles remain unknown.

6. CONCLUSIONS

To sum up, although the research on oral care for the elderly in mainland China has been widely carried out nationwide, it still faces many challenges. Oral nursing is a combination of stomatology and nursing. With the rapid development of stomatology, the requirements for nurses have continuously increased. However, oral nursing in mainland China started relatively late, which has a huge gap with stomatology. What's more, a series of systems for oral nursing talent education, training and certification have not been formed yet. In the future, the academic exchanges and cooperation between nurses, dental specialists, psychotherapists and other multidisciplinary talents can be further strengthened and make concerted efforts to develop innovative consciousness to improve the oral care quality and nursing satisfaction of the elderly. At the same time, it is possible to strengthen the professional training of oral care knowledge and skills for nurses, establish the oral specialty nursing education model, formulate the performance appraisal system, and build a professional oral care team to meet the diversified service needs of the elderly. Finally, by introducing evidence‐based nursing, we can construct and constantly improve the oral care quality evaluation system for the elderly in line with mainland China's national conditions, objectively monitor the oral care quality of the elderly, deeply explore the causes of disease‐related adverse events, carry out effective quality control of each key nursing link, actively respond to population ageing and committed to the development of oral health.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE FIELD STATEMENT

The elderly are at high risk of developing oral diseases due to numerous underlying diseases, lack of oral health knowledge, and low frequency of daily oral health behaviours etc. Poor oral health status will impose heavy medical and economic burdens on families, societies and countries. In this work, we analysed the status, hotspots and trends of research on oral care for the elderly in mainland China in the past 20 years through bibliometrics. We showed that the oral health‐related quality of life has received more and more attention in recent years and is a hot research topic in both Chinese and English language publications. However, there is a lack of research on oral care for elderly patients living in long‐term care facilities at present. There is a large gap in the number of publications between different regions, and the degree of cooperation is low, which may hinder the further development of academic research. Thus, we put forward prospects and point out the directions for future researches and explorations. This study has revealed, for the first time, an in‐depth understanding of oral care in the elderly in mainland China; these results may have implications in the care of oral health problems.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Conceptualization: Jingwen Zhang, Yanqiu Weng, Lingjuan Zhang. Formal analysis: Wenyao Chen, Mengting Qiao. Writing‐original draft: Jingwen Zhang. Writing‐review & editing: Lingjuan Zhang, Yanqiu Weng. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

FUNDING INFORMATION

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not‐for‐profit sectors.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

ETHICS STATEMENT

This study did not involve animal or human experiments, so the ethical statement is not shown here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Shanghai Geriatric Nursing Management Quality Control Center, where this study was entirely conducted.

Zhang, J. , Weng, Y. , Qiao, M. , Chen, W. , & Zhang, L. (2023). Research status, hotspots and trends on oral care research in the elderly published from 2002 to 2022: A bibliometric analysis – A review article. Nursing Open, 10, 4907–4918. 10.1002/nop2.1798

Jingwen Zhang and Yanqiu Weng contributed equally to this work and share first authorship.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The original data supporting the conclusions of this paper will be provided by the authors without reservation.

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