An Assessment of the World's Contribution to Osteoporotic Vertebral Compression Fractures: A Bibliometric Analysis of Surgical Management; An AO Spine Knowledge Forum Trauma and Infection Initiative

Abstract

Study DesignBibliometric analysis.ObjectivesAnalysis of literature on surgical management of osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures to identify the top contributing authors, countries, collaborators and the trends of research.MethodsA search to identify original articles published in English between 2011 and 2020 was done using specific keywords in the Web of Science database. After screening, 442 articles met the criteria which were analysed using Biblioshiny R software.ResultsThe top contributing authors were Yang HL (first), Wang H (second) and Hao DJ (third). Amongst the universities, the major contributing ones were Soochow University (first), Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine (second) and University of Toronto (third). China (first), USA (second) and South Korea (third) were the top contributing countries. The maximum articles were published in Spine, Osteoporosis International and European Spine Journal. The most common articles were on comparisons between kyphoplasty and vertebroplasty, the associated complications and newer modalities of investigations of osteoporosis. Major work surrounds the keywords kyphoplasty and vertebroplasty which are significantly clustered as compared to others.ConclusionsThe study identified the most prolific contributing authors (Yang HL, Wang H) and universities (Soochow University, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine), the journals where this work is considered more impactful (Spine, Osteoporosis International) and the top contributing countries (China, USA) and collaborations. This study showed that major work is regarding the cement augmentation techniques of kyphoplasty/vertebroplasty and the attempts at establishing newer techniques of diagnosis of osteoporosis. The study also brought out major differences in findings from that of the previously published study on spine trauma bibliometrics.

Keywords: bibliometric; classification; compression fracture; fragility fracture; global trends; kyphoplasty; osteoporosis; vertebroplasty.

Figure 1.

The contributions of top authors over time.

Figure 2.

The contributions of journals analyzed using Bradford’s Law.

Figure 3.

The contribution of various countries across the world. The darker shades correspond to higher contribution to the field.

Figure 4.

The contribution from various countries across time.

Figure 5.

The number of the top occurrences of the author keywords.

Figure 6.

Thematic analysis to decipher the structure of knowledge using co-citation analysis of author keywords.