Osteoporosis in postmenopausal women in this decade: a bibliometric assessment of current research and future hotspots

Summary

Postmenopausal osteoporosis (PMOP) has already become a major public health problem. However, there was no bibliometric analysis estimating the evolutionary process of PMOP research.

Purpose

This study aimed to assess its scientific activity.

Methods

Publications on PMOP were retrieved from Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) of the Web of Science (WoS) from 2008 to 2018. VOSviewer software was used for data mining and visualization. The quantity of papers, number of citations, citation frequency per year, and H-index were assessed and compared among different countries, institutes, and researchers.

Results

A total of 11,142 papers were included and were cited 184,416 times. The USA contributed the most papers (3162), the most citations (83,270 times), and the highest H-index (115). Canada ranked first for the number of papers per million populations and per trillion GDP. Seven of the top ten funding agencies were industries. The key words were stratified into four clusters: cluster 1 (“basic research”), cluster 2 (“diagnosis”), cluster 3 (“treatment”), and cluster 4 (“others”). Average appearing years (AAY) of key words in cluster 1 were the largest compared to those in clusters 2 and 3. For hotspots, “miRNA” showed a relatively latest AAY of 2017.63, followed by “abaloparatide” and “adipokine”.

Conclusion

We concluded that the USA and Europe were the most productive regions on PMOP, with a high prevalence of articles supported by pharmaceutical companies. Key word focus gradually shifted from “diagnosis” to “treatment” and then to precision medicine orientated “basic research”. It is recommended to pay attention to potential research hotspots, such as “miRNA,” “abaloparatide,” and “adipokine”.