A bibliometric and visualized analysis of meniscus suture based on the WOS core collection from 2010 to 2022: A review

Meniscus suture is an important treatment method for meniscus injury and contributes to the preservation of proprioception, restoration of knee biomechanics and alleviation of progressive osteoarthritis. However, there are few visualized analyses concerning the present studies of meniscus suture. This paper aims to evaluate the global trends, highlights and frontiers of meniscus suture. A bibliometric analysis was conducted based on the results of studies related to meniscus suture from web of science core collection. VOSviewer, GraphPad Prism, Microsoft Excel and R-bibliometrix were utilized for the bibliometric analysis of country and institution distribution, chronological distribution, source journals analysis, prolific authors and institutions analysis, keywords analysis, and reference co-citation analysis. A total of 950 publications on meniscus suture from 177 different sources were retrieved over the set time span. These publications were completed by 3177 authors from 1112 institutions in 54 countries. The United States was the most prolific country with 7960 citations and 348 publications (36.63%). Furumatsu Takayuki acted as the most prolific author (51 publications), while Robert F LaPrade with 1398 citations was the most-cited author. And more papers were published in the core journals, including American Journal of Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy-The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery, Knee Surgery Sports Traumatology Arthroscopy and Arthroscopy Techniques. Furthermore, “meniscus healing,” “meniscus root tear” seem to be the emerging research hotspots. Notably, the publication trend concerning the all-inside suture technique has been rising during the past decade. The number of research publications on meniscus suture has been continuously risen since 2010. The authors, publications and institutions from the United States and East Asia were still the mainstays in this field. And the all-inside suture may become the mainstream surgical technique in the future, with meniscus healing and meniscus root tears being research highlights recently.