The Annual Growth Trend of Publication Outputs
From January 2000 to October 2023, there were 1088 publications related to infected aortic aneurysms from WOSCC. As shown in Fig. 2, the general trend of publications about infected aortic aneurysms were increasing steadily year by year since 2004, indicating that increasing attention were focus on this disease. Of note, a decline emerged from 2013 to 2017, followed by a rise since 2017. In 2021, the number of related papers reached a peak, of which 90 papers were published.
Different types of publication could reflect the depth of research in the field. In terms of publication types of those 1088 articles, original articles accounted for the majority (801, 73.62%), followed by Review (100, 9.19%), Editorial (98, 9.01%), Letter (25, 2.30%), etc.
Global Geographic Distribution of Infected Aortic Aneurysms Research
Distribution and co-authorship analysis of Countries/Regions
If studies involved multiple countries, each country was counted individually. As for geographical distribution, a total 62 different countries and regions containing 1088 publications were took into analysis, generating a world map (Fig. 3) and a precedence table (Table 1). The country with the largest output of publications is the United States (242, accounting for 22.2% of the total), followed by Japan (n = 165, 15.2%), China (n = 130, 11.9%), England (n = 76, 7.0%) and France (n = 63, 5.8%). Except for publications of the United States surpassing other countries greatly, citation of the documents published by the United States was also far ahead of others (3524 citations). As for collaboration, the United States was far ahead of the rest of countries and cooperated with others extensively. The EU countries also cooperated with each other closely. Curiously, the second and third productive country, Japan and China, collaborated with others minimally instead, with total link strength of only 3.
Table 1. Top 10 most productive countries/regions.
Rank
|
Countries/regions
|
Publications
|
Citations
|
Total link strength
|
1
|
United States
|
242
|
3524
|
15
|
2
|
Japan
|
165
|
1087
|
3
|
3
|
China
|
130
|
1952
|
3
|
4
|
England
|
76
|
1388
|
14
|
5
|
France
|
63
|
1268
|
17
|
6
|
Germany
|
43
|
1346
|
7
|
7
|
Netherlands
|
40
|
568
|
8
|
8
|
Italy
|
38
|
362
|
11
|
9
|
Canada
|
30
|
312
|
1
|
10
|
Sweden
|
27
|
853
|
15
|
Total link strength represents all links between the node and other nodes. The strength of a link is given by zero or a positive number. The total link strength of a node that has no link with others is 0.
Distribution and co-authorship analysis of Institutions
The top 10 most productive institutions were listed in Table 2. Among the top 10 institutions, 6 of 10 were from China, which corresponded to China being the third productive countries, but contradictory to the rank of the United States. Therefore, we analyzed the top 40 prolific institutions and found that 14 American institutions (14/40, 35%) were included. The most prolific and influential organization was the Mayo Clin, with 21 publications and leading citations of 822.
Table 2
Top 10 most zealous Institutions.
Rank | Institutions | Publications | Citations |
1 | Mayo Clin | 21 | 822 |
2 | Chang Gung University | 21 | 258 |
3 | National Taiwan University | 15 | 352 |
4 | National Cheng Kung University | 12 | 542 |
5 | Uppsala University | 12 | 515 |
6 | Chang Gung Mem Hospital | 11 | 82 |
7 | University of Copenhagen | 11 | 45 |
8 | National Cheng Kung University Hospital | 10 | 537 |
9 | University of Tokyo | 10 | 134 |
10 | National Taiwan University Hospital | 9 | 426 |
VOSviewer was used to present the cooperation network map of institutions with more than three articles, as shown in Fig. 4. There were 65 institutions grouped into three main clusters. The red cluster mainly represented American institutions, including Mayo Clin that took the lead, Michigan university and California Los Angeles University etc. The green cluster represented Chang Gung University, National Taiwan University, National Cheng Kung University etc., mainly being located in China. The blue clusters represented institutions from Japan and EU states. Each cluster mainly represented a single country, indicating that international cooperation among institutions from different countries needed to be strengthened.
Distribution Characteristics of the Network of Infected Aortic Aneurysms Research
Distribution of Categories
As shown in Fig. 5, the co-occurrence mapping of the category network was generated by CiteSpace to present a clearer interdisciplinary situation. The 1088 publications were divided into 47 categories, of which the top 10 high-frequency categories were listed in Table 3. It was found that infected aortic aneurysms research was a multi-disciplinary field. Among the categories, surgery ranked first place with 475 publications, indicating that current research of infected aortic aneurysm focused on surgical procedures of treating the disease. The second category was peripheral vascular disease with 388 articles published, and the third category, cardiac/cardiovascluar systems with 173 articles. It’s noted that the category of respiratory system ranked first in betweenness, for infection of respiratory system including staphylococcus aureus infection etc. being a common source of infected aortic aneurysm18.
Table 3
Top 10 high-frequency categories.
Rank | Categories | Publications | Betweenness |
1 | Surgery | 475 | 0.38 |
2 | Peripheral Vascular Disease | 388 | 0.27 |
3 | Cardiac & Cardiovascular systems | 173 | 0.56 |
4 | Medicine, General & Internal | 97 | 0 |
5 | Infectious Diseases | 64 | 0.69 |
6 | Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging | 57 | 0.49 |
7 | Respiratory System | 53 | 0.88 |
8 | Microbiology | 33 | 0.03 |
9 | Immunology | 28 | 0.71 |
10 | Pharmacology & Pharmacy | 13 | 0.37 |
Distribution of Journals
we extracted the top 10 most prolific journals in the field of infected aortic aneurysm and their impact factor in 2022(Table 4). The most prolific journal was the Journal of Vascular Surgery with 107 articles published and 4.3 of impact factor. The second and the third most-prolific journals were Annals of Vascular Surgery (95 articles, IF 1.5) and European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery (44 articles, IF 5.7).
Table 4
Top 10 most prolific journals.
Rank | Journals | Articles | Impact Factor |
1 | Journal of Vascular Surgery | 107 | 4.3 |
2 | Annals of Vascular Surgery | 95 | 1.5 |
3 | European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery | 44 | 5.7 |
4 | Annals of Thoracic Surgery | 32 | 4.6 |
5 | Journal of Endovascular Therapy | 26 | 2.6 |
6 | Vascular and Endovascular Surgery | 23 | 0.9 |
7 | Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery | 17 | 1.7 |
8 | Vascular | 17 | 1.1 |
9 | Cureus Journal of Medical Science | 16 | 1.2 |
10 | Internal Medicine | 16 | 1.2 |
Impact Factor (2022) was extracted from Web of Science. |
Distribution of Author Collaboration
To demonstrate the most influential and active researchers in this field, we first counted the publication numbers by individual researchers in the past decades (Table 5). Sorelius Karl published 16 articles in the first place, followed by Mani Kevin and Wanhainen Anders. Next, we evaluated the most influential researchers based on the cumulative number of citations (Table 6), with Oderich Gs and Panneton Jm being tied for the first, Grabitz K, Muller Bt et al. sharing the third. Muller Bt et al. had the same citations, for publishing an article “Mycotic aneurysms of the thoracic and abdominal aorta and iliac arteries: Experience with anatomic and extra-anatomic repair in 33 cases”. In the article, Muller Bt et al.19 suggested establishment in diagnosis of infected aortic aneurysm before rupture could substantially lower operative mortality rate, and in-situ reconstruction was feasible and not more dangerous than other common surgical procedures. The VOSviewer software was used to construct a visualization map of authors’ cooperation network. These authors who published more than 3 articles were took into consideration (Fig. 6). According to Fig. 6, there were multiple potential cooperation teams in the author’s cooperation network. Especially, there were three note-worthy cooperation teams in the cooperation network, which were represented by red, green, and blue networks. The first team was the red team represented by Sorelius Karl, Mani Kevin and Wanhainen Anders. Their publication “Infective Native Aortic Aneurysms: Call for Consensus on Definition, Terminology, Diagnostic Criteria and Reporting Standards” proposed a standardized definition of infected aortic aneurysm, which was an aortic aneurysm caused by microbial infection of the aortic wall14. In consideration of the misleading term “mycotic”, Sorelius Karl et al.14 also proposed to use three terms, “mycotic aortic aneurysm”, “infected aortic aneurysms”, and “infective native aortic aneurysm” synonymously. The second (green) and the third research team (blue) represented by Ko Po-Jen, Yu Shenng-Yueh etc. and Huang Yao-Kuang etc. respectively.
Table 5
The top 10 most prolific authors.
Rank | Authors | Publications |
1 | Sorelius Karl | 16 |
2 | Mani Kevin | 12 |
3 | WanhainenAnders | 11 |
4 | Kan Chung-Dann | 8 |
5 | Oderich Gs | 7 |
5 7 8 9 10 | Panneton Jm Hsu Ron-Bin Ko Po-Jen Lin Fang-Yue Yu Sheng-Yueh | 7 7 7 6 6 |
Table 6
The top 10 most influential authors.
Rank | Authors | Citations |
1 | Oderich Gs | 514 |
1 | Panneton Jm | 514 |
3 | Grabitz K | 437 |
3 | Muller Bt | 437 |
3 | Pillny M | 437 |
3 3 3 9 10 | Sandmann W Thomas L Wegener Or Yang Yu-Jen Mani Kevin | 437 437 437 430 415 |
Analysis of Keywords and Burst Terms
We used a network, overlay and density visualization of author-given keywords to analyze the co-occurrence of keywords (Fig. 7). A total of 2,233 keywords were analyzed, of which the 100 most frequently occurring that met the inclusion threshold were grouped into 5 clusters (Fig. 7A): cluster 1 (red) including “infection”, “pseudoaneurysm” and “abdominal aortic aneurysm”; cluster 2 (green) including “experience”, “reconstruction”, “replacement”, “surgical management” and “in-situ reconstruction”; cluster 3 (blue) including “repair”, “EVAR” and “surgery”; cluster 4 (yellow) including “abscess”, “endocarditis” and “follow-up”; cluster 5 (purple) including “stent-graft”, “rupture”, “dissection” and “mortality”. The overlap map (Fig. 7B) was used to reveal the evolution trend of research hot spots. It showed us that the change of hot spots in infected aortic aneurysm research was minimal from 2010 to 2023. Moreover, by analyzing three maps of keywords visualization (Fig. 7), we found that the researchers in this field attached much importance to clinical research. The exploration of basic research was still in an embryonic stage.
Furthermore, we analyzed strongest frequency bursts involved in infected aortic aneurysm research with CiteSpace (Fig. 8). The strongest frequency bursts refer to the sudden increase of citations of certain documents in a certain period, which can help us find emerging research topics that have attracted much attention in a certain field. Before 2016, “thoracic aorta”, “grafts”, “replacement” and “surgical treatment” were the focus of this field. It is indicated the researches during this period fastened on clinical research. Significantly, “stent graft treatment” appeared in 2010, representing clinic began to concentrate on endovascular treatment of infected aortic aneurysm. After 2016, “endovascular treatment”, “in situ reconstruction” and “endovascular aortic repair” became the burst keywords, showing that medical researchers paid more and more attention on the development of endovascular aortic repair. It’s curious that “infective endocarditis” emerged as a bursting keyword from 2019 to 2023, for endocarditis as a source of bacteria has become rare and several other risk factors has been more common19.