JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the widespread application of robot to surgery, a growing literature related to robotics in surgery (RS) documents widespread concerns from scientific researchers worldwide. Obviously, such application is helpful to considerably improve the accuracy of surgery. However, we lack of the understanding of the status of interdisciplinary and topic distribution related to RS.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to detect interdisciplinary nature and topic hotspots on RS by analyzing the current publication outputs related to RS.

Methods:

The authors collected publication related to RS in the last 21 years, which indexed by Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). Various bibliometric methods and tools were used, including literature distribution analysis at country and institution level, interdisciplinary collaboration analysis in the different period of time. Co-word analysis was performed based on the keywords with high-frequency. The temporal visualization bar presented the evolution of topics over time.

Results:

A total of 7,732 bibliographic records related to RS were identified. The United States plays a leading role in the publication output related to RS, followed by Italy and Germany. Notice, the Yonsei University in South Korea published the highest amount of RS-related publications. The interdisciplinary collaboration is uneven; the disciplines covered by RS have expanded from 34 in the first six years to 85 disciplines in the last five years, the total number of which is 91 disciplines. Meanwhile, the number of disciplines involved in each paper dropped from the initial 1.60 to the current 1.31; the number of clusters for discipline stabilized at around 13. The research field of RS has been relatively fixed, and the communication within the cluster is widespread. Surgery, Engineering, Radiology & Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging, Neurosciences & Neurology are the four core disciplines in the field of RS, all of which have extensive links with other disciplines. The distribution of topic hotspots is in imbalanced status, which can be divided into 7 clusters. The evolution of topic can be divided into three areas, namely (1) the exploration of techniques that make robotics in surgery realized; (2) rapid development of various robotic devices in medicine, and (3) application of robot to excision of tissue or organ targeted at various specific diseases.

Conclusions:

This study provides important insights into the interdisciplinary nature related to RS, which shows that the surgery still remain the core and basic discipline of RS-related research. And there are close connections within the cluster and interaction between the clusters. The research topic hotspot related to RS is relatively scattered, but there are some similarities. Our study is helpful to provide a potential guide of the direction of the field of RS for future research in the field of RS.