A global bibliometric analysis on Kawasaki disease research over the last 5 years (2017-2021)

Abstract

Background: Kawasaki disease (KD) is a systemic vasculitis of unknown etiology that mainly affects children. We aim to conduct a bibliometric analysis to explore the latest research hotspots and trends of KD.

Method: By using the keywords "Kawasaki disease," "Kawasaki syndrome", and "Mucocutaneous Lymph Node Syndrome," the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases were searched for publications related to KD from 2017 to 2021. Author, country and journal submissions were classified and evaluated using Biblioshiny software (using R language). VOSviewer (version 1.6.18) was used to visualize the relevant network relationships.

Result: According to the search strategy, 5,848 and 6,804 KD studies were published in WOS and Scopus, respectively. The results showed an overall increasing trend in the number of publications and citations during the study period. The three most influential institutions in the WOS were St. Marianna University, Kawasaki Medical School and The University of Tokyo in Japan, while in Scopus, Harvard Medical School, University of California and Tehran University of Medical Sciences were the most influential institutions. The most influential authors of the two databases are Goodman SG, Kazunori Kataoka, and Takeshi Kimura of the WOS and Marx Nikolau and Wang Y, Burns JC, and Newburger JW of the Scopus, respectively. And Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Pediatrics were the most critical journals. The most cited documents were the WOS document by McCrindle et al. and the Scopus document by Benjamin et al. published in 2017, while the keywords in the last few years were focused on "COVID-19," "multisystem inflammatory syndrome," and "pandemic."

Conclusion: This bibliometric analysis summarizes for the first time the research progress in KD (2017-2021), providing a qualitative and quantitative assessment of KD research bibliometric information. In the field, researchers mainly from Japan and USA are dominant, followed by China. It is recommended to pay close attention to the latest hot spots, such as "COVID-19" and "multisystem inflammatory syndrome." These results provide a more intuitive and convenient way for researchers to obtain the latest information on KD.

Keywords: COVID-19; Kawasaki disease; Scopus; Web of Science; bibliometric analysis.

Figure 1

Global publication trends (A) and citation trends (B) for KD research. The left vertical coordinate indicates the average number of citations per document, and the right vertical coordinate indicates the average number of citations per year.

Figure 2

A line chart showing the annual trend of documents published in the top six journals of KD research (2017–2021): (A) WOS and (B) Scopus. The abscissa represents different years, the ordinate represents the number of documents published each year, and different color curves represent different journals.

Figure 3

Analysis of the WOS and Scopus databases for the co-citation author network (A, B) and author collaboration network (C, D) involved in KD research from 2017 to 2021. Different colors represent different clusters, and the size of the network area is proportional to the link length.

Figure 4

Collaboration networks between the most prominent research institutions in KD research: (A) WOS and (B) Scopus. Different colors belong to different clusters and the area of the dots is proportional to the inter-institutional collaboration.

Figure 5

Network visualization of collaborations among countries of KD research in WOS (A) and Scopus (B).

Figure 6

Visualized word-clouds of keywords plus in WOS (A) and Scopus (B) (Only show the first 50 keywords).

Figure 7

Time-based visualization of keywords variation: (A) WOS and (B) Scopus.

Figure 8

Three field plots on KD research. The picture represents the authors who have made the greatest contribution to KD research in the past 5 years (2017–2021), the author keywords and the inflow and outflow of countries. AU, author; DE, author Keywords; AU_CO, countries.