Global Trends in Research of Perioperative Analgesia Over Past 10 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Background: The postoperative acute pain caused by surgery has been a major problem plaguing anesthesiologists, and even some acute pain progresses to chronic pain syndrome, terribly reducing the quality of life of patients. To this end, increasing attention has been paid to the management of perioperative analgesia. At present, with the increase of research on perioperative analgesia, the understanding and solution of this clinical problem have been further developed. Bibliometrics can estimate research hot-spots and trends of related fields in a certain period of time. However, a systematic bibliometric analysis has not been conducted to explore current research hotspots and future development trends, which is thus the purpose of this study.

Methods: Articles and reviews published from 2012 to 2021 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database, and the bibliometric analysis of the keywords and references of articles was performed using VOSviewer1.6.18. Besides, the number of articles related to perioperative analgesia in term of countries, affiliations, authors, and journals were analyzed.

Results: Finally, 3157 articles meeting the screening requirements were retrieved, and it was hereby found that the research on perioperative analgesia had received more attention and interest in the past 10 years, with the United States making more contributions, where there were eight of the top ten affiliations by the number of publications. Kaye AD was the most active researcher in this field. Most related articles were published in Anesthesia and Analgesia, accounting for 2.76% of all literature. Enhanced recovery after surgery, different types of anesthesia and multi-mode analgesic drug intervention were the main trends and hotspots.

Conclusion: Perioperative analgesia has attracted considerable academic interest. In the past decade, the effects of enhanced recovery after surgery, different types of anesthesia and multi-mode analgesic drug intervention on perioperative analgesia have become the research hotspots, which are also likely to be the focus of future study.

Keywords: VOSviewer; bibliometrics; enhanced recovery after surgery; pain; perioperative analgesia.

Figure 1

Flowchart of the screening process.

Figure 2

(A) The number of articles published annually in this field over the past decade. (B) The fitting curve of the annual number of publications and the year. (C) The top three countries in terms of number of publications.

Figure 3

Network map of co-cited references. Among the 74,448 references, 133 references (divided into five groups: group 1: Red, group 2: Green, group 3: Blue, group 4: Yellow, group 5: Purple) were cited at least 35 times.

Figure 4

The mapping on keywords related to perioperative analgesia research. (A) 129 keywords were divided into 5 groups by different colors (group 1: Red, group 2: Green, group 3: Blue, group 4: Yellow, group 5: Purple) with the minimum co-occurrence times of 30. The size of the node represents the co-occurrence frequency and the closeness of the co-occurrence relationship with other keywords. (B) Visual network map of keywords according to the APY. The more yellow the node is, the later the keyword occurrences.

Figure 5

Density visualization map for 129 keywords. Each keyword in the density map shows the frequency of its occurrence in related research fields. Red represents the high-frequency keyword, and the position of the keyword is related to the degree of correlation between it and other keywords. The position in the center indicates the stronger correlation with the others.