Trends and profile of scientific production on the use of objective structured clinical examination in health sciences areas

Introduction: The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has positioned itself as a key tool to assess skills optimally and reliably. This study sought to analyze the trends and profile of the scientific production on its use in health sciences. Materials and methods: A descriptive and cross-sectional study was carried out on bibliometric data. We included 844 articles on OSCE published in journals indexed in Scopus between 2018 and 2022. A descriptive and cross-sectional analysis was performed to bibliometric data with the Scival tool. Results: The number of publications has increased from 2018 to 2022, most of these are in high impact scientific journals. Most articles had national collaboration (42.4%) and international collaboration presented more citations per publication (6.5). The institution with the highest scientific activity was Harvard University, in addition to being the one with the highest impact. The journals Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning and Medical Science Educator have more publications, but the Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions (1,744) has a higher normalized impact. Zabar Sondra leads in scientific output, but MacArio Alex (0.91) has a higher weighted impact. Conclusions: Research has increased, mainly in scientific journals of greater prestige and impact, and with more frequent national collaboration; in addition, there is greater participation of authors and institutions from North America.