Mapping Trends and Hotspots Regarding the Use of Ultrasound in Emergency Medicine: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research.

Sheng Wang,Jingli Zhang,Demeng Xia,Wenhao Meng,Shuogui Xu,Yanping Zhang,Zhentao Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2021.764642

Abstract

Objective: Diagnostic tools in emergency medicine have been widely studied. As a non-invasive and quick tool, ultrasound plays a role in the field of emergency medicine. Thus, it is significant to understand the global scientific output of this topic. An analysis of publications on the use of ultrasound in emergency medicine over the past decade was performed and summarized to track the current hotspots and highlight future directions.Methods: Globally relevant publications on ultrasound in emergency medicine from 2009 to 2020 were extracted from the Web of Science collection database. VOSviewer software and CiteSpace were employed to visualize and predict the trends in the research on the topic.Results: The overall volume of global publications is on the rise; furthermore, the United States published the most publications in this field and had the most citations and H-index. University of California at San Francisco in the United States has most publications in terms of institutions. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine published the most papers related to ultrasound in emergency medicine in terms of journals. Pulmonary embolism was once the main research direction, and importantly, “point-of-care ultrasound” was determined to be a new research hotspot.Conclusion: Altogether, the number of publications on ultrasound in emergency medicine will rise in the future. In addition, the findings reported here shed new light on the major progress on ultrasound in emergency medicine, which may be mutually cooperative in various fields. Moreover, this bibliometric study provides further indications for the topic of “point-of-care ultrasound”.

Highlights

With the advancement of medical technology, ultrasound, as a non-invasive and convenient diagnostic tool, has been widely applied in the field of medical treatment, such as for the diagnosis of pleural effusion [1], tumor metastasis [2], and thrombosis [3]
By analyzing and summarizing the data, the five aspects of contributions of countries, contributions of different journals and top 10 articles, contributions of different institutions, keywords and related fields will be presented in the results
According to the Journal Citation Report from the Web of Science (WOS) database, all articles related to the use of ultrasound in emergency medicine had been cited 18,542 times since 2009 (15,545 times without self-citations), with an average citation frequency of 11.21 times per paper

Summary

Introduction

With the advancement of medical technology, ultrasound, as a non-invasive and convenient diagnostic tool, has been widely applied in the field of medical treatment, such as for the diagnosis of pleural effusion [1], tumor metastasis [2], and thrombosis [3]. With regard to the diagnosis of emergency diseases such as acute kidney stones [6], the rupture and hemorrhage of parenchymal organs [7, 8] and respiratory failure [9], ultrasound still plays an indispensable role. It is not convenient to move critically ill patients in the intensive care unit, and bedside ultrasound is helpful to assess disease progression. Researchers and institutions continue to expand the application of ultrasound in the field of emergency medicine, but the details of current research trends have not yet been reported or tracked

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion