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AIM

The aim of this study is to examine to what extent there is a co-production in research in the field of health and welfare between scientific institutions and universities in Thailand and Sweden.

BACKGROUND

At the School of Health, Care and Social Welfare at Mälardalen University the cooperation with Thailand includes both education and research. The cooperation has went on since 2009 including the Ministry of Health and their nursing and public health colleges as well as two universities, Mahidol university and Rangsit university. The latest agreement of cooperation covers the years 2013 - 2017. The cooperation takes place mainly through student exchange and training on graduate and advanced in the field of health and welfare, but also by some research contacts.

METHOD

The study is based on a systematic literature review in three multidisciplinary databases; Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed databases. The scoping has been limited to scientific articles. Three different search strategies have been used. To elaborate on the precision of the search it has been carried out in three steps. The initial search was based on the keywords ‘Health and Welfare’ as well as ‘Thailand and Sweden’ in the title as well as abstract. The second search was focused on ‘affiliation/address, author, Thailand and Sweden’. For PubMed the search included only 2013, because it was from this year it was possible to search for more than one affiliation/address. The third search was a deepening search by a concretization of ‘Health and Welfare’ based on other keywords related to disciplines, as specific concepts such as ‘caring, nursing, sociology, physiotherapy, public health, social work, psychology’ or appropriate disciplines. A limitation was made by including only studies between the two countries, not multicenter studies from more countries in which the two countries have signed. Further, duplicates were excluded in the analysis. Regarding the reliability of the articles the quality of the articles will be more analyzed in a final step of the process.

FINDINGS

The first conceptual search resulted in 210 articles, distributed by the keywords Health and Welfare (4), Health (199) and Welfare (7). The second search resulted in 422 articles that showed that most of these items were not at all in the area of ​​health and welfare, but other fields as engineering, physics, medical chemistry, biomedicine and animal studies. In the third search 56 articles in all three databases were identified. For the aim of this study 17 were considered relevant.

IMPLICATIONS

This study demonstrates that there is a research collaboration and joint scientific publishing in many scientific disciplines and areas between the two countries, Thailand and Sweden. The co-production occurred primarily during the last 10 years. However there is a limited degree in the area of Health and Welfare. Only one of the identified articles were written by a cooperation with researchers in Thailand and at Mälardalen University.

Recurring annual systematic literature reviews in the area of Health and Welfare will be a way to track the progress of co-production between universities in Thailand and Mälardalen University. This study can function as baseline study for such reviewing.