Themes and policies on population ageing: a bibliometric approach

Abstract

The profound transformations that have occurred in many developing and, above all, developed countries have led to changes in the structure of populations worldwide. Currently, scientific communities are discussing how these components of population change impact and interact with social and economic conditions, medical situations and cultural factors, to shape the characteristics and dynamics of ageing. The ageing of the population poses several challenges for policymakers in many regions and countries. The labour market, health and welfare systems are some of the social contexts in which it is possible to act to face new demands of an increasingly less balanced population. This creates the need to identify possible responses within scientific communities to construct a knowledge-based institutional reaction (in terms of policies) in line with the profound changes taking place. Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore the scientific production on population ageing through bibliometric techniques to analyze scientific productivity and extract the main themes. The explorative approach allows us to intercept the main topics of discussion within the relevant communities of scholars. Through bibliometric analysis, statistical tools are applied to perform a quantitative study of the scientific production of a certain period (1985 2022), in journal articles and their metadata (e.g. authors, affiliations, citations). We extract research topics using the text-mining methods contemplated within the bibliometric approach. The results concern the identification of scientific orientations and trends useful for policy making. In particular, the results relate the number of publications in the analysed time span, author profiles and latent concepts.