Hotspots and Trends of Graduate Public Health Education Research in China

Academic research trends involving public health education may reflect a certain degree of talent construction status. This study systematically reviews the data for published literature on graduate public health education, aiming to provide evidence for the optimization of public health postgraduate training mechanisms in China. Keyword cooccurrence analysis was performed based on high-frequency keywords. From 1992 to 2008, the annual number of publications in this field was relatively low in China, averaging fewer than 5 articles. The number of publications showed a steep increase after 2009. The publications were mostly from single research institutions, including comprehensive universities and military medical universities, concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai. The high-frequency keywords were public health and preventive medicine, postgraduate training, professional degree, MPH, curriculum, and teaching reform. Hotspots consisted of practical teaching research, training, educational reform and comparative education research. Research on public health postgraduate education has not reached scale and has insufficient support. Moreover, many problems in graduate public health education still cannot be solved by existing studies: authentic and practical learning, a unified approach to cultivate graduate students, organizational change of graduate public health education, and international cooperation and public health education.