Advances in plastic and cosmetic surgery at home and abroad - a bibliometric analysis

Plastic and cosmetic surgery is a new branch deriving from plastic surgery. Although several studies concerning advances in plastic and cosmetic surgeries have been reported, most literatures focus on specific diagnosis and treatment technology, but not the overall progress.

We attempt to use bibiometric analysis to investigate main research hotspots at home and abroad, outstanding researchers and excellent institutions.

We retrieved relevant literatures published between 2007 and 2011 in five foreign and four Chinese journals. gCLUTO was used to perform double clustering analysis. Price's Law was used to analyze authors with high yield. Literature profiling was performed to construct author-keyword and institution-keyword matrix to comprehend research feature of high yield authors and research institutions.

A total of 67 and 94 high-frequency words were obtained from English and Chinese journals. Clustering analysis indicated that research hotspots at home and abroad mainly included side-effects of augmentation mammoplasty and its therapy, eyelid plastic surgery, cartilage transplantation and/or cartilage suture in nose plastic surgery, plastic surgery in cheilopalatognathus and nasal deformity, construction of surgical flaps, and facial plastic cosmetology. In addition, several authors and institutions with high yield also had been identified and they might have different research features.

We investigate advances, hotspots, experts and their institutions in plastic and cosmetic surgery in recent five years at home and abroad, which would provide some research directions for professionals of plastic and cosmetic surgery.