A bibliometric and social network analysis of pelvic organ prolapse during 2007-2016

Abstract

Background: Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) seriously affects the life quality of old females. In the present work, we described the knowledge structure of POP in a macroscopic view, and summarized the recent research focus.

Methods: Candidates were identified through reading and screening publications from PubMed database with a MeSH term of "pelvic organ prolapse" during 2007-2016. Relevant journals and journal-affiliated countries were extracted, and essential information, such as the number of publication of each year, first authors and MeSH/subheading words, was analyzed with BICOMB. In addition, highly-frequent MeSH/subheading words were determined and classified, and co-occurrence matrices were produced accordingly. Finally, social network was utilized to analyze the knowledge structure.

Results: A total of 3294 publications of POP were retrieved from 364 journals. The publication of POP had a significant downward trend since the beginning of 2015. POP articles published in American and British journals were significantly more compared with other countries. The co-occurrence matrices of 37 × 37 and 55 × 55 were produced by the highly-frequent MeSH/subheading words, and then the social network analysis was performed based on them.

Conclusion: These publications on POP were mainly from the developed countries. Surgical treatment of POP was a hot topic of POP research in recent 10 years.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; Co-word analysis; Pelvic organ prolapse; Social network analysis.