Comparing the Scholarship Contributions of Five Disciplines to the Occupational Licensure Literature Indexed in Web of Science™

Objective: To provide a synopsis of the occupational licensure literature and how scholarship contributions (i.e., research, reviews, book chapters, conference proceedings, editorials, and other) compare across the five largest contributory disciplines indexed in the Web of Science (TM) (WOS) bibliographic database. Methods: Data were extracted in May 2019 from the WOS (Clarivate Analytics) bibliographic database and analyzed using Histcite and VosViewer. Bibliographic information was identified using a standard keyword and Boolean operator search and was downloaded into a plain text ANSI file from WOS. Results: A total of 507 pieces of content were identified. The top five contributing disciplines were nursing (68), law (68), economics (59), education (35), and medicine (34). The first item indexed appeared in 1931, and for the next 40 years, a handful of content items were published sporadically. Between 1971 to 2005, scholarship on occupational licensure was initiated consistently with small numbers of articles being authored each year. Between 2005 and May 2019, there was a rapid growth in scholarship. Conclusions: Differences in the focus and volume of published content were observed, with nursing, law, and economics being the most prolific disciplines. The findings of this study add weight to the call for the nursing profession to be more actively involved in policy discussions, as they have far greater potential to bring evidence to the decision-making table.