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Review
. 2021 Jan 21;8(1):5.
doi: 10.1186/s40779-021-00300-z.

Research progress of heat stroke during 1989-2019: a bibliometric analysis

De-Meng Xia #  1 , Xu-Ren Wang #  2 , Pan-Yu Zhou #  1 , Tian-Le Ou  3 , Lei Su  4 , Shuo-Gui Xu  5
Affiliations
Review

Research progress of heat stroke during 1989-2019: a bibliometric analysis

De-Meng Xia et al. Mil Med Res. .

Abstract

Background: Heat stroke (HS) is an acute physical disorder that is associated with a high risk of organ dysfunction and even death. HS patients are usually treated symptomatically and conservatively; however, there remains a lack of specific and effective drugs in clinical practice. An analysis of publication contributions from institutions, journals and authors in different countries/regions was used to study research progress and trends regarding HS.

Methods: We extracted all relevant publications on HS between 1989 and 2019 from Web of Science. Using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS, version 24) and the software GraphPad Prism 8, graphs were generated and statistical analyses were performed, while VOSviewer software was employed to visualize the research trends in HS from the perspectives of co-occurring keywords.

Results: As of April 14, 2020, we identified 1443 publications with a citation frequency of 5216. The United States accounted for the largest number of publications (36.2%) and the highest number of citations (14,410), as well as the highest H-index at 74. Although the sum of publications from China ranked second, there was a contradiction between the quantity and quality of publications. Furthermore, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise published the most papers related to HS, with Lin MT publishing the most papers in this field (112), while the review by Knochel JP received the highest citation frequency at 969. The keyword heat-stress appeared most recently, with an average appearing year of 2015.5. In the clinical research cluster, exertional heat-stroke was determined to be the hotspot, while ambient-temperature and heat waves were the new trends in the epidemiological research cluster.

Conclusions: Corresponding to this important field, while the contributions of the publications from the United States were significant, the mismatch between the quantity and quality of publications from China must be examined. Moreover, it is hypothesized that clinical and epidemiological studies may become hotspots in the near future.

Keywords: Citation frequency; Heat stroke; Publications.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow diagram of the inclusion process. The detailed process of screening and enrollment
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Contributions of different countries/regions to the research field regarding HS. a The number of publications, citation frequency (×0.05), H-index (×5) and GDP (×5, per trillion dollar) in the top 20 countries or regions; b The number of publications worldwide and the time course of relative research interest of HS; c The number of publications from the top three and other countries per year. RRI. Relative research interest
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Distribution of institutions and journals focused on HS. a Distribution of top 20 journals publishing research on HS; b Distribution of top 20 institutes publishing research on HS
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The analysis of keywords in publications on HS. a Mapping of the keywords in the area of HS. The words were divided into three clusters in accordance with different colors that were generated by default, specifically, basic research (left in red), clinical research (up in green), and epidemiological research (right in blue). The large icon indicates the keywords that appeared at a high frequency; b The distribution of keywords is presented according to the average time of appearance, with the blue representing an early appearance and the yellow indicating keywords that have appeared more recently. The smaller the distance is between two keywords, the greater the frequency of their co-occurrences
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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