Research progress in rehabilitation treatment of stroke patients: A bibliometric analysis

Stroke presents as a transient or chronic brain dysfunction and is associated with high morbidity and high mortality. The doctors and scientists would like to argue how to enhance the validity of the rehabilitation treatment and how to further improve the level of treatment on stroke.

The aim of this study was to quantitatively analyze the current worldwide progress in research on stroke rehabilitation treatment based on Web of Science database and ClinicalTrial.gov in the past 10 years.

We conducted a quantitative analysis of clinical trial articles regarding stroke rehabilitation published in English from 2003 to 2013 and indexed in the National Institutes of Health Clinical Trials registry and Web of Science databases. Data were downloaded on March 15, 2013.

(1) From 2003 to 2013, 2 654 clinical trials investigating stroke were indexed in ClinicalTrials.gov. There were only 58 clinical trials registered in 2003, and there was a marked increase from 2005. A total of 605 clinical trials on the rehabilitation of stroke were conducted in the past 10 years. (2) The analysis showed that most of the trials in the field were registered by North American institutions. With respect to the Asian countries, China and Taiwan area of China also published a reasonable proportion of the trials, but comparatively speaking, the number of trials is really rare. Most of the interventions were drugs, followed by the devices, and behavioral interventions were ranked third. (3) In the past 10 years, there were 4 052 studies on stroke indexed by Web of Science database.

From perspective of research progress, we found that the number of clinical trials and papers on stroke rehabilitation has increased significantly in the past 10 years, between them a remarkable positive correlation exists.