Visualization analysis of research hotspots in non-surgical treatments for idiopathic scoliosis / 中华全科医师杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To visualize the research hot spots and frontiers of non-surgical treatments for idiopathic scoliosis (IS) based on CiteSpace.Methods:The Web of Science Core Database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure from 1990 to 2020 were searched for studies of non-surgical treatments of idiopathic scoliosis. The time, distributions of nations, institutions, academic disciplines and keywords of literature were analyzed. With CiteSpace 5.7.R4 and Excel 2017, the visualized knowledge graphs and the data tables were generated.Results:A total of 822 studies including 548 articles in English and 274 articles in Chinese were retrieved, including 378 articles published during 2015—2020. The top three nations with higher number of published articles were USA (114 studies), Canada (77 studies) and China (68 studies). Studies covered 33 disciplines, including rehabilitation, engineering and orthopedics, and the betweenness centrality of rehabilitation medicine was the highest (0.59). The non-surgical treatment research was focused on adolescents (187 studies) and brace treatment (116 studies). From 1990 to 2014, the non-surgical treatment of IS mainly focused on the brace treatment (70.4%,69/98) in domestic studies. After 2014, comprehensive treatments such as exercise therapy and manual therapy gradually became the research trend in this field (61.3%,92/150). Research hotspots included different forms of brace treatment (betweenness centrality 0.31), exercise (6 studies), manual therapy (3 studies), guide of medicine (2 studies), acupuncture therapy (2 studies) of non-surgical treatments. Among top 30 research institutions for domestic publication of Chinese literature, there were 22 tertiary hospitals, 1 secondary hospital, 5 schools, 1 comprehensive rehabilitation service organization, and 1 community health service center.Conclusion:The research content of non-surgical treatment for idiopathic scoliosis tends to be diversified, comprehensive treatment of exercise therapy, brace therapy, and manual therapy are currently the main research hotspots.