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. 2023 Nov 14:11:e48354.
doi: 10.2196/48354.

Global Scientific Trends in Virtual Reality for Pain Treatment From 2000 to 2022: Bibliometric Analysis

Xun Yang #  1 , Sen Zhong #  2 , Sheng Yang #  2 , Meng He  1 , Xu Xu  1 , Shisheng He  2 , Guoxin Fan  3 , Lijun Liu #  1
Affiliations

Global Scientific Trends in Virtual Reality for Pain Treatment From 2000 to 2022: Bibliometric Analysis

Xun Yang et al. JMIR Serious Games. .

Abstract

Background: Virtual reality (VR) is a computer simulation technique that has been increasingly applied in pain management over the past 2 decades.

Objective: In this study, we used bibliometrics to explore the literature on VR and pain control, with the aim of identifying research progress and predicting future research hot spots.

Methods: We extracted literature on VR and pain control published between 2000 and 2022 from the Web of Science Core Collections and conducted bibliometric analyses. We analyzed the publication and citation trends in the past 2 decades, as well as publication and citation analyses of different countries, institutions, journals, and authors. For references, we conducted cocitation and burst analyses. For keywords, we conducted co-occurrence, clustering, timeline view, and citation burst analyses.

Results: Based on 1176 publications, we found that there was a continuous increase in publication and citation volumes, especially in the last 5 years. The United States was the most representative country, and the University of Washington was the most representative institution, with both having the most publications and citations. The most popular journal in this field was Burns, and Hoffman HG was the most productive author, leading many studies on patients with burn pain. The reference with the most citation burst was a study on the verification of new hardware in pain control. The keywords with the highest citation bursts related to various situations of pain such as "burn pain," "wound care," "low back pain," and "phantom limb."

Conclusions: VR has been applied in various clinical situations for pain management, among which burns and pediatric surgery have achieved satisfactory results. We infer that VR will be extended to more clinical pain situations in the future, such as pain control in wound care, low back pain, and phantom limb pain. New research hot spots will include the development of software and hardware to improve the immersive experience of VR for pain control. However, our work was based solely on English literature from the Web of Science database. For future studies, we recommend that researchers explore literature from multiple databases to enhance the scope of their research.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometrics; pain management; research trends; virtual reality.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. The screening process of the selected literature in this study.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Annual trends of publications and citations.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Distribution of countries and institutions. (A) Cooperation mapping of different countries. (B) Citation mapping of different countries. (C) Cooperation mapping of different institutions. (D) Citation mapping of different institutions.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.. Distribution of journals and authors. (A) Publication mapping of different journals. (B) Cocitation mapping of different journals. (C) Cooperation mapping of different authors. (D) Cocitation mapping of different authors.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.. Distribution of references. (A) Cocitation mapping of different references. (B) Top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.. Keyword analyses. (A) Co-occurrence mapping of different keywords. (B) Clustering mapping of different keywords. (C) Timeline view mapping of different keywords. (D) Top 25 keywords with the strongest citation bursts.
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