What Is Known about Midazolam? A Bibliometric Approach of the Literature

Abstract

Midazolam is a drug with actions towards the central nervous system producing sedative and anticonvulsants effects, used for sedation and seizures treatments. A better understanding about its effects in the different scenarios presented in the literature could be helpful to gather information regarding its clinical indications, pharmacological interactions, and adverse events. From this perspective, the aim of this study was to analyze the global research about midazolam mapping, specifically the knowledge of the 100 most-cited papers about this research field. For this, a search was executed on the Web of Science-Core Collection database using bibliometric methodological tools. The search strategy retrieved 34,799 articles. A total of 170 articles were evaluated, with 70 articles being excluded for not meeting the inclusion criteria. The 100 most-cited articles rendered 42,480 citations on WoS-CC, ranging from 253 to 1744. Non-systematic review was the most published study type, mainly from North America, during the period of 1992 to 2002. The most frequent keywords were midazolam and pharmacokinetics. Regarding the authors, Thummel and Kunze were the ones with the greatest number of papers included. Our findings showed the global research trends about midazolam, mainly related to its different effects and uses throughout the time.

Keywords: bibliometrics; midazolam; sedation.

Figure 1

Flowchart of the literature and article screening.

Figure 2

Distribution of the 100 most-cited articles about Midazolam by continents and countries. Mapchart created with mapchart.net and adapted by the authors.

Figure 3

Network visualization of co-authorship cluster of Midazolam studies. Clusters with the same color and with more proximity indicate a strong relationship between each other, and co-citation is represented by the lines between clusters.

Figure 4

Network of co-occurrence and density-citation view of keywords used by the authors on the 100 most-cited studies about Midazolam. (A) Keywords network, in which clusters are represented by different colors and the lines indicate co-citation links between keywords; (B) Keywords- density visualization ranging from blue (lowest density) to red (highest density).