Cardiac Rehabilitation: A Bibliometric Review From 2001 to 2020

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a serious threat to global public health due to its high prevalence and disability rate. Meanwhile, cardiac rehabilitation (CR) has attracted increasing attention for its positive effects on the cardiovascular system. There is overwhelming evidence that CR for patients with CVD is effective in reducing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. To learn more about the development of CR, 5,567 papers about CR and related research were retrieved in the Web of Science Core Collection from 2001 to 2020. Then, these publications were scientometrically analyzed based on CiteSpace in terms of spatiotemporal distribution, author distribution, subject categories, topic distribution, and references. The results can be elaborated from three aspects. Firstly, the number of annual publications related to CR has increased year by year in general over the past two decades. Secondly, a co-occurrence analysis of the output countries and authors shows that a few developed countries such as the United States, Canada, and the UK are the most active in carrying out CR and where regional academic communities represented by Sherry Grace and Ross Arena were formed. Thirdly, an analysis of the subject categories and topic distribution of the papers reveals that CR is a typical interdiscipline with a wide range of disciplines involved, including clinical medicine, basic medicine, public health management, and sports science. The research topics cover the participants and implementers, components, and the objectives and requirements of CR. The current research hotspots are the three core modalities of CR, namely patient education, exercise training and mental support, as well as mobile health (mHealth) dependent on computer science. In conclusion, this work has provided some useful information for acquiring knowledge about CR, including identifying potential collaborators for researchers interested in CR, and discovering research trends and hot topics in CR, which can offer some guidance for more extensive and in-depth CR-related studies in the future.