Analysis of publication trends,distribution and quality
The output and trend of related Publication
A total of 2,283 eligible publications were retrieved, including 2022 articles and 261 reviews. It can be noted that from 1994 to 2020, the number of related publications of PJI presents a growing trend over time. In particular, more than 100 publications have been published annually since 2013. Moreover, the curvilinear model predicts that more than 700 publications will be published by 2030(Fig 1a).
Analysis of countries (or regions) distribution
Overall included PJI related literatures come from 69 different countries or regions. Among them, the United States (1010,44.24%) is the country that contributes the most to PJI research, and Germany ranks the second in the number of publications (287,12.571%), followed by China (159,6.956%), the United Kingdom (156,6.833%) and Italy (118,5.169%). Publications in other countries are below 100 (Fig 2a, b)
Evaluation of the Quality of publications
The quality of publications is evaluated according to the three quantitative indicators of h-index, average citations per item, and total cited frequency of publications. As can be seen from the bar chart (Fig3a), the top 5 h-index countries are the United States (79), Germany (35), the United Kingdom (27), Switzerland (27), and Spain (22). As for the average cited index, Switzerland (42.2) ranked first, Switzerland (30.6) ranked second, followed by USA (27.16), AUSTRIA (21.39), UK (20.43) (Fig3b). The top five countries in Total cited frequency are USA (27434), Germany (4525), UK (3187), Switzerland (2540), and Italy (1506), respectively (Fig3c).
Characteristic of publications
Institution contributions
Regarding institutional output, the top five were Thomas Jefferson Univ (157) Mayo Clin (122), Thomas Jefferson Univ Hosp (83), Rush Univ (81), and Rothman Inst (57) (Fig4a).
Authors contributions
Surprisingly, Professor, Parvizi J published 209 studies, nearly four times the number of studies published by second Della Valle CJ (58) and third Tan TL (52). The number of articles published by other authors in the top 10 is less than 50 (Fig4b).
Research orientation
Currently, the popular research directions are orthopedics (1511) surgery (707), and infectious disease (175). The top ten research fields are shown in Figure 4c.
Journals of publishing researches
In terms of journals publishing researches on PJI, the Journal of Arthroplasty, with an impact factor(IF) of 3.524(2019), has published as many as 467 studies, ranking first. Additionally, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research(IF=4.154,2019) and Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery American Volume (IF=4.716,2019) ranked second and third with published 191 studies and 124 studies respectively. Publications from these three journals accounted for about one-third (34.11%) of the total(Fig4d).
Funds Name
The United States Department of Health Human Services (71) is the largest funding source for research. This was followed by the National Institutes of Health NIH USA (70) and the Natural Science Foundation of China National (43). The three funds are from the United States and China, respectively(Fig4e).
Visualized analysis
Generally speaking, total link strength (TLS) is the primary parameter used to identify the relative importance of a node in visual analysis results. TLS is positively correlated with the significance of the nodes.
Visual analysis of Bibliographic coupling
The visualization tool VOS viewer was used to perform Bibliographic coupling analysis of overall included publications according to three subgroups: Countries, Institutions, and Journals. When establishing a national Bibliographic coupling analysis, the minimum threshold of documents is set to 3, which is finally shown in figure 5a for 48 countries. Among them, the top three TLS are USA (658209), Germany (286828), and UK (182405). Similarly, in the analysis grouped by organization, 181 organization names are shown in the visual diagram (Fig5b). The top three organizations in TLS are Thomas Jefferson Univ (181425), Mayo Clin (124305), and Rush Univ (115770). In the analysis grouped by source journals, the order of the top three journals in TLS is exactly the same as the ranking order of the number of posts, which are Journal of Arthroplasty (273081), Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research(126052), and Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery American Volume (108129) respectively(Fig5c).
Visual analysis of co-citation
The cited references and cited sources were grouped for co-citation analysis. The co-citation analysis was carried out according to the cited references and cited sources. The significance of creating co-citation analysis is that we can know the number of times several references are cited at the same time according to TLS. Only references that have been cited more than 30 times are shown in figure 6a. The results indicated that the top three references for TLS were "Parvizi J, 2011, Clin Orthop Relat R, v469, p3022," “Trampuz A, 2007, New Engl J Med, v357, p654”, and "Zimmerli W, 2004, New Engl J Med, v351, p1645”. It can be found that most of the studies with high co-citation are published in high-level journals. In addition, the minimum threshold for cited sources is set to 30. Finally, 266 journals were presented in the network map (Fig6b). The top three journals in TLS are Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research (133158), Journal of Arthroplasty (120641), and Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery American Volume (118879), which are also fairly influential in the field of orthopedic.
Visual analysis of co-authorship
It can clearly understand the close degree of cooperation between the nodes of countries, between the nodes of authors, and between the nodes of institutions by creating co-authorship analysis. The minimum threshold of publications was set to 5, which showed the 43 nodes of countries, 316 nodes of author, and 118 nodes of institutions in Fig7. The top three countries in TLS are the USA (260), the UK (169), and Germany (166). The top three authors in TLS were Della Valle CJ (516), Parvizi J (181), Tan TL (156). The top three institutions in TLS were Thomas Jefferson Univ (156) Rush Univ (116), and Mayo Clin (102).
Visual analysis of Key Word Co-occurrence
The co-occurrence analysis of keywords is a crucial means to find the current research hotspots of PJI. The principle is to determine the significance of keywords by counting the number of occurrences of keywords in the titles and abstracts of all included literatures .In this analysis, select the counting method as binary counting and set the minimum co-occurrence number to 20. In the end, the visualization map generally presents 660 terms in four clusters, which are "Study on diagnosis of PJI" (red), "Related risk factors of PJI " (blue), "Study on treatment of PJI" (green), and "Study on anti-biofilm in vitro" (yellow) (Fig8a).
In the “Study on diagnosis of PJI” cluster, the most eye-catching keywords are sensitivity, accuracy, biomarkers, value, and culture. In the cluster of “Related risk factors of PJI”, the keywords with more repetitions are obesity, risk, body mass index (BMI), age, gender and diabetes. In the “Study on treatment of PJI” clusters, the most popular keywords are debridement, outcome, reconstruction, score, and components. In the “Study on anti-biofilm in vitro” cluster, the most prominent keywords are antibiotics, pathogen, prevention, activity, bacteria, strains. These four categories represent the main research direction of PJI. Besides, an overlap visualization diagram of colour variation with the time axis (2014-2017) was drawn according to the approximate year in which keywords appear (Fig8b). Although studies concentrated on all four areas before 2015, after 2016, most studies focused on risk factors and diagnosis of PJI.