The Current Research Landscape of Maternal Health Care for Women with Disabilities: A Bibliometric Perspective

Background: Maternal health care for pregnant women with disabilities reflects the extent to which health systems are prepared to deliver equitable and inclusive services. However, pregnant women with disabilities continue to experience limited and often inequitable access to maternal health care. This paper aims to map the existing scientific publications on maternal health services for pregnant women with disabilities in order to construct a knowledge framework and inform future research directions.

Methods: Relevant documents were retrieved from the Scopus database using a combination of keywords: women OR people AND with disabilities OR with a disability AND maternal OR maternity AND healthcare OR health service. A total of 255 records were initially identified and subsequently screened based on the following criteria: (1) documents at the final publication stage; (2) source type limited to journals; (3) published before 2026; and (4) English-language publications. After screening, 222 documents remained that were further refined to yield 69 eligible documents. Bibliometric visualization and analysis were conducted using the Bibliometrix R Studio package and VOSviewer.

Results: The bibliometric analysis revealed a document average age of 4.72 years and an average of 16.01 citations per document. International co-authorship accounted for 28.99% of the publications. The most cited document received 120 citations, while the most productive author was Mitra M, with six publications and 88 citations. Disability and Health Journal was the leading journal publishing on this topic, and University College London was the most prominent institutional affiliation. The United States contributed the highest number of publications (51 documents). The most frequently occurring keywords were “pregnancy” and “disability.”

Conclusion: This bibliometric analysis underscores the importance of directing future research toward strengthening global collaboration in studies addressing maternal health care for women with disabilities. In addition to promoting a more evenly distributed research landscape and strengthening global collaboration, future research is recommended to focus on monitoring health services for women with diverse types of disabilities, conducting longitudinal studies on the improvement of health care providers’ skills and competencies, and evaluating the implementation of policies related to maternal health services across all age groups within the disability population.