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. 2022 Mar 10:10:846601.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.846601. eCollection 2022.

Global Tendency and Frontiers of Research on Myopia From 1900 to 2020: A Bibliometrics Analysis

Mengyuan Shan  1 , Yi Dong  2   3 , Jingyi Chen  1 , Qing Su  2 , Yan Wan  1   2   3
Affiliations

Global Tendency and Frontiers of Research on Myopia From 1900 to 2020: A Bibliometrics Analysis

Mengyuan Shan et al. Front Public Health. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Background: Myopia is one of the most common causes of vision impairment in children and adults and has become a public health priority with its growing prevalence worldwide. This study aims to identify and evaluate the global trends in myopia research of the past century and visualize the frontiers using bibliometric analysis.

Methods: The literature search was conducted on the Web of Science for myopia studies published between 1900 and 2020. Retrieved publications were analyzed in-depth by the annual publication number, prolific countries and institutions, core author and journal, and the number of citations through descriptive statistics. Collaboration networks and keywords burst were visualized by VOSviewer and CiteSpace. Myopia citation network was visualized using CitNetExplorer.

Results: In total, 11,172 publications on myopia were retrieved from 1900 to 2020, with most published by the United States. Saw SM, from the National University of Singapore, contributed the most publications and citations. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science was the journal with highest number of citations. Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery with the maximum number of publications. The top 10 cited papers mainly focused on the epidemiology of myopia. Previous research emphasized myopia-associated experimental animal models, while recent keywords include "SMILE" and "myopia control" with the stronger burst, indicating a shift of concern from etiology to therapy and coincided with the global increment of incidence. Document citation network was clustered into six groups: "prevalence and risk factors of myopia," "surgical control of myopia," "pathogenesis of myopia," "optical interventions of myopia," "myopia and glaucoma," and "pathological myopia."

Conclusions: Bibliometrics analysis in this study could help scholars comprehend global trends of myopia research frontiers better. Hundred years of myopia research were clustered into six groups, among which "prevalence and risk factors of myopia" and "surgical control of myopia" were the largest groups. With the increasing prevalence of myopia, interventions of myopia control are a potential research hotspot and pressing public health issue.

Keywords: CitNetExplorer; bibliometric analysis; global trends; myopia; myopia control; public health; refractive surgery.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The annual number of published myopia studies, 1900–2020. As the data in 2021 are still updated, they are not included in this figure.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Density visualization for keywords in co-occurrence network map. Each keyword in the density visualization has colors that indicates its appearing frequency. Keywords in yellow emerge more frequently, while green emerge blue less frequently.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The top 29 keywords with the strongest citation bursts in myopia research from 1990 to 2020. The blue lines represent the base timeline, while the red segments represent the burst duration of the keywords.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Myopia citation network graph from CitNetExplorer from 1900 to 2000. The vertical axis coordinates indicate the publication year. Each dot/square indicates a publication which is labeled with the last name of the first author. Each color marks a group. Group 1 to group 6, in turn, were colored green, blue, purple, yellow, orange, and brown, respectively. The square represents the publication with the highest citation score in each group.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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