Analysis of publications
Searches from the WOS database show that from its inception to April 2023, a total of 330 publications finally met the inclusion criteria. As shown in figure 1, Article (n=290, 93.9%), followed by Editorial Material (n=8, 2.6%), Letter (n=5, 1.6%), Review (n=5, 1.6), and Correction (n=1, 0.3%)。The results in figure 2 show that the earliest publication on arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury, published by Matthews LS in 1999, shows that there is no significant difference between arthroscopy and open resection of the distal clavicle14. The number of publications showed a significant upward trend. According to the development trend of this research field, the annual publication quantity is divided into three stages. The first stage is from 1999 to 2006. During this period, the number of papers published each year is relatively stable, with 14 published in 2004 and less than 10 in other years. The second stage is from 2008 to 2015. During this period, the number of publications showed a rapid growth trend. The number of annual publications increased from 12 in 2008 to 31 in 2015. More than 1/3 papers were published during this period, with an average annual volume of 15.9. The third stage is from 2016 to 2022, the number of annual publications shows a slowing growth trend. However, it is worth noting that during this period, the number of annual publications remained high, with an average of about 19 copies per year, the highest in the three stages, indicating an increasing trend in the overall heat of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury. the research in related fields is still the focus of the current research.
Analysis of countries and regions
Geographical maps produced by SciMago Graphica show that a total of 35 countries have contributed to the arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury(figure 3). According to the number of publications, Table 1 lists the 10 countries with the highest production, of which the United States published the most publications between 1999 and 2023 (n=115, 34.8%), followed by Germany (n=65, 19.7%), France (n=24, 7.3%), China (n=17, 5.2%) and South Korea (n=16, 4.8%). Most of the 10 countries with the highest output are concentrated in Europe, the Americas and Asia, of which only Turkey and China are developing countries, and the rest are developed countries. This situation shows that there are obvious regional differences in the study of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury, and the main reason for the difference is the country's technological and economic strength. Countries with good technological and economic development play a leading and core role in related fields. The United States also has the highest citations (n=2,956), about twice as many as the second-ranked UK (n=1467). In terms of the average citations, the United States has the highest average citations (n=25.7). It is worth noting that although only 9 papers have been published, the average citations of Austria and Canada are 22.2 and 24.6, respectively, indicating that the quality and research level of publications in these two countries are higher. In the collaboration network generated by SciMago Graphica (figure 4), the United States and Germany have larger collaboration networks with different countries. Among them, the cooperation between the United States and Canada, Germany and Austria is strong, and there is a strong willingness to cooperate. There is also a small amount of cooperation between other European and American countries, but the Asian countries with a high volume of publications, China and South Korea, have basically no cooperation and exchanges with other countries.
Analysis of institutions
A total of 516 institutions have publications on arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injuries. As shown in Table 2, the institution with the largest number of publications is Tech Univ Munich (n=12), followed by Rush University (n=9) and Charite (n=7). Among the top 10 institutions, Tech Univ Munich has the highest citations (n=349). In addition, it is worth noting that although University of Connecticut has only published 5 articles, the average citations is the largest (n=146), which is 3.2 times higher than that of the second Charite Univ Med Berlin (n=45.3), indicating that the overall research level of University of Connecticut is high and the quality of the paper is higher. The minimum number of institutional publications is set at 2, and 76 institutions are selected for co-author analysis through the VosViewer (figure 5). 76 institutions form the largest network of institutional co-authors, divided into 45 clusters. The red cluster is the largest, including 8 institutions with Ctr Osteoarticulaire Cedres as the center. The green cluster ranks second, focusing on Tech Univ Munich. The top three institutions with the largest total link strength (TLS) are Ctr Osteoarticulaire Cedres (TLS=9), Rehabilitation and ATOS Clin Munich (TLS=8) and Tech Univ Munich (TLS=7). Although these institutions participate in more cooperation than other institutions, the overall cooperation between institutions is still less.
Analysis of journals
Between 1999 and 2023, publications related to arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury were published in 79 journals. Among the 10 most published journals listed in Table 3, Arthroscopy-the Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery published the most papers (n=52), followed by Knee Surgery Sports Traumatology Arthroscopy (n=33) and Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (n=24).Bradford's Law15 can be used to identify core journals in different fields, which arranges journals according to the decreasing order of the number of publications, so that the Core Zone with the highest number of publications and the Second Zone and Third Zone with the same number of publications as the core can be distinguished in all journals. In this case, the relationship between the number of journals in the core area and the subsequent regions is 1:a:a2. Therefore, there are three core journals in the current research field (Table 4). They are Arthroscopy-the Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery, Knee Surgery Sports Traumatology Arthroscopy and Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery respectively. In terms of citations and average citations, Arthroscopy-the Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery has the highest citations (n=1290), followed by American Journal of Sports Medicine (n=1206). Among the top 10 journals, American Journal of Sports Medicine has the highest average citation (nasty 67), and IF is also the highest (IF=7.01). VosViewer is used to create a visualized map of co-citation analysis of journals. The result of figure 6 shows a periodical co-citation network with 79 nodes. The size of the node represents the status of the journals and the number of publications. As shown in figure 6, all journals are divided into four clusters. The blue cluster contains journals such as Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery and American Journal of Sports Medicine, which represent journals related to ACJ injury. The green cluster represented by Arthroscopy-the Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery represents the journals related to arthroscopy.
Analysis of authors.
From 1993 to 2023, 1338 authors published papers related to arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury. The top 10 prolific authors are listed in Table 5. The author with the largest number of publications is Imhoff AB(n=8)16, Followed by Scheibel M(n=7)17 and Millett PJ(n=6)18. It is worth noting that Mazzocca AD19 with only 4 publications has the highest citations and average citations, which are 450 and 112.5, respectively. It shows that the research of Mazzocca AD in the field of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury is more thorough, the publications are of high quality, and the research is authoritative. According to Price,s Law20,the minimum number of publications by core authors in a certain field is m=0.749x√nmax, nmax, which represents the number of publications of the most productive authors in the field. According to VosViewer statistics, nmax=8, m=2 is calculated, so authors with more than two articles (including two articles) are designated as the core authors in this field. Among all 1338 authors, there are a total of 117 core authors, accounting for 91% of the total publications. It has reached half of the standards proposed by Price, so it can be considered that a relatively stable cooperative group has been formed in the field of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury. In the VosViewer, we select 117 core authors to make a visualized analysis of the co-author analysis. The network is divided into 38 clusters (figure 7). The largest cluster consists of nine authors, but their research is focused on between 2016 and 2018. The Schoebel T21-centered cluster (7 authors), whose research in this field is concentrated after 2020, is a relatively new and closely cooperative research team, and it is also a team with great potential in the current field.The top three authors of total link strength are Scheibel M17(TLS=15), Boyer P22(TLS=15) , and Barth J23(TLS=14), which shows that the three authors have done more cooperation with others.
highly cited publications
Table 6 shows the top 10 most cited publications in the field of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury. The studies were conducted between 2001 and 2014, with each publication cited at least 87 times. The publication with the highest citation (n= 299) was written by Mazzocca AD in 2007 and published in American Journal of Sports Medicine entitled "Evaluation and Treatment of Acromioclavicular Joint Injuries". The intent is to provide a current, in-depth treatise on all aspects of acromioclavicular joint complex injuries to include anatomy, biomechanics, benchmark studies on instability and reconstruction, clinical and radiographic evaluation, and to present the most recent clinical research on surgical outcomes.24The second cited publications (n=280) was also written by Mazzocca AD, which shows the core position of Mazzocca AD in this research field.
Bibliometric and visualized analysis of keywords
Using CiteSpace to analyze the keywords, a co-occurrence network with 398 nodes and 2506 connections is obtained. After merging similar words, a keyword co-occurrence graph is obtained (figure 8). The top 20 keywords with the highest frequency are shown in Table 7, and the top five most frequently used keywords are “acromioclavicular joint dislocation” (158 times), “arthroscopic resection” (72 times), “arthroscopic reconstruction” (70 times), “coracoclavicular ligament” (47 times) and “surgical treatment” (44 times). The size of the centrality of keywords should not only study the importance and influence, but also reflect the research hotspots in the field. However, not all high-frequency keywords have high centrality at the same time. The key words with high centrality are “arthroscopic resection”(centrality=0.23)、“arthroscopic reconstruction”(centrality=0.21)、“acromioclavicular joint dislocation”(centrality=0.19)、“distal clavicle resection”(centrality=0.15)、“fixation”(centrality=0.11). After clustering the keywords, seven clusters are generated (figure 9). The Q value is 0.4344, which indicates that the clustering structure is significant, and the S value is 0.7697, which indicates that the clustering structure is reasonable. In figure 9, seven clusters are divided into two categories according to the types of keywords in each cluster. The high-frequency keywords included in the first category of clustering are #5“acromioclavicular joint dislocation”, #3“acromioclavicular joint”, #2“separation” and 6#“tendon”. It mainly describes which diseases or injuries belong to ADJ injury. The second category of clustering includes 4# “arthroscopic stabilization”,1#“coracoclavicular ligament reconstruction”, 0#“resection”, which represents different types of ACJ injury using various arthroscopic surgery methods. Figure 10 is the keywords sequence diagram of arthroscopic treatment of ACJ injury, which can reflect different development processes and interrelationships. As can be seen from figure 10, the evolution process of 0#“resection” is the most abundant and has the deepest influence on each cluster. In addition, we generated a map with the strongest reference to the burst keyword. Figure 11 lists the top 22 keywords. The five keywords with the highest bursting power are “complication”, “stabilization”, “separation”, “reduction” and “hook plate”. It shows that these words have a high burst rate in a short time, which is a hot topic in this field. In addition, the keywords “fixation”, “complications”, “arthroscopically assisted stabilization”, “shuolder arthroscopy” have also surged in recent years, indicating the hotspots and frontier of research in this field.