Bibliometric evaluation of ultrasound in orthopaedics global publications: 10-year trends and hotspots

Abstract Background. The past decade has witnessed the development of ultrasound in orthopaedics, the growth rate of publications has been accelerating. In this study, analysis of the publications on ultrasound in orthopaedics over the past decade has been completed. We aim to provide inspiration for future research on ultrasound in orthopaedics through our work.Methods. All relevant publications between 2009 and 2020 from Web of Science were collected. Statistical Package for Social Science and GraphPad Prism 8 software were used to generate and analyse diagrams. Meanwhile, from the aspects of co-occurring keywords, VOSviewer software and CiteSpace were employed to visualize the research trends.Results. 1,677 publications with a citation frequency of 20,311 were identified. The United States published most publications in this filed and the number of citations was also the highest, as well as the highest H-index. Although China ranked sixth in terms of the number of publications, the growth trend in the future will be fastest. Furthermore, Skeletal Radiology published the most papers related to ultrasound in orthopaedics, Ozcakar, L had published the most papers, and a study by Kwon, YM received the highest citation frequency. The keywords about "MRI", "complication", "female" and "male" were noted as new topics.Conclusions. Through the research, while the contributions of the publications from the United States were significant, the growth rate of Chinese publications in the future cannot be ignored. Moreover, it is hypothesized that diagnosis and epidemiology studies may become hotspots.