Research progress of pre-hospital emergency during 2000-2020: a bibliometric analysis

The past decade has witnessed the preliminary development of pre-hospital emergency. We analyzed the scientific output related to pre-hospital emergency in the past two decades, aiming to evaluate the publication status of the literature related to pre-hospital emergency through bibliometrics analysis, and hope to provide enlightenment of trends and hotspots for the development of pre-hospital emergency.

By web of science, all literature on pre-hospital emergency from 2000 to 2 October 2020 was retrieved and screened by two researchers. Excel, Social Sciences Statistics Package (SPSS, version 24) and software GraphPad Prism 8 were used to analyze the publication trend in related fields. Besides, VOSviewer, Citespace were also applied to visualize the research trends and study the co-occurring keywords in pre-hospital emergency.

As of 2 October 2020, a total of 1839 pre-hospital emergency publications with total citation of 32800 times were identified. The United States accounted for the largest number of publications (36.7%) and the highest number of citations (12825), but its H-index was fourth (20.17). In the aspects of journals and articles, Prehospital Emergency Care is the most published journal in pre-hospital emergency (256), while the articles from Smith K presented the highest citation frequency (751). We can also obtain the information that the overall trend is upward, and developed countries contribute most. "Complications" is a hot research field in intensive care. In the identification research cluster, "acute ischemic stroke" was determined to be the hotspot, while "secondary outcome" was the new trend in the first-aid cluster. As for the management, "embase" was noted as new topics.

In the past decade, researches on pre-hospital emergency has increased rapidly. However, the related articles were mainly published in developed countries, the United States has absolute advantages especially. Moreover, first-aid studies may become hotspots in the near future.