Health Worker Potential for Expanded Exploration of Public “Frontlineness”: A Scientometric Analysis

Public-sector frontline service scholarship in the field of public administration has been conducted under relatively limited circumstances and contexts. While literature focusing on the topic has been prolific, the context and lenses through which “frontlineness” has been viewed and observed are more limited (Chang & Brewer 2022). The scholarship on street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) has focused on a well-defined, though narrow, set of workers and work environments (e.g., teachers and nurses; schools and hospitals); those concentrated and consistent parameters may present an opportunity for greater generalizability of our understanding of SLBs than previously realized. We seek something of a new beginning: for theoretical exploration, clarity, and eventual reassessment of what frontlineness is and what it means. Healthcare has been a field in which public administration scholars have—either adjacently or directly—explored the nature of frontline work. We hypothesize, however, that there is much territory that goes unexplored due to siloing of disciplines, narrow definitions of what it means to be on the “frontline,” and more limited use in public administration scholarship of available evidence synthesis methods. One such method, scientometric analysis, provides useful tools to explore the potential of fields such as healthcare, with its results providing the “lay of the land” for further exploration. Using a scientometric analytical approach, this paper offers an answer to the following research question: What is the potential for existing research to describe the proximal relationship between a frontline healthcare employee and the frontline itself?