Mapping the knowledge domains of medical textiles: A review

As the world’s textile industry shifts towards manufacturing high value-added textile structures and products, medical textiles have drawn extensive attention from researchers and the related research field is rapidly developing in recent years. To provide readers a systematic overview of this research field, a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scientific publications related to the field in performed and visually presented using the software CiteSpace and VOSviewer in this paper. Totally 2839 papers have been retrieved and collected from the core database of Web of Science™. First, the papers are divided into several groups and quantitatively analyzed based on the year of publication, the citations in each year, and the disciplines involved in the papers. VOSviewer is adopted to analyze the collaboration among countries, organizations, and authors in the research community as well as their research output and influence in terms of citation. Then the major journals in the field are identified through performing co-citation analysis on source journals of all references cited in the retrieved papers. In addition, the highly cited papers and their references are listed in this paper. They offer researchers a glimpse of the internal relationship of scientific literature and the dynamic structure of scientific evolution. Finally, the co-occurrence analysis of keywords is also performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The connection between various disciplines in the research field is revealed, so that the scientific development history, the research hotspots, and main research directions in the field can be traced.