Knowledge domain and emerging trends in visual hallucination research: A scientometric analysis

Visual hallucination (VH) refers to a spontaneous visual perception without corresponding external stimuli and often occurs in ophthalmological and neuropsychiatric disorders. It is associated with poor quality of life, and increased patient hospitalization and nursing home admission. To date, a scientometric analysis of research on VH is lacking.

To objectively summarize the features of VH research and gain insights into the emerging trends in research on VH.

CiteSpace V was used in this article. Publication outputs, document types, geographic distributions, co-authorship status, research hotspots, and co-citation status were analyzed. A total of 2176 original articles and 465 reviews were included in the database downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection. We selected the top 50 most cited or occurring articles or items to create a visualized network with a 1-year interval. In the document co-citation analysis stage, we performed clustering analysis on co-cited references, and log likelihood tests were used to name the clusters.

The results showed that most publications can be classified into neurology, sports, and ophthalmology studies. In addition, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia published the most documents. Some well-known authors have always had a leading role in this field; meanwhile, new authors keep emerging. A relatively stable cooperation has been formed among many authors. Furthermore, neuropsychiatric symptom and functional connectivity are the top hotspots. Research on VH in dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's disease (PD) have received much attention. Studies on VH in PD are likely to be the new emerging trends in the future, especially the mechanisms of VH.

Research on VH has formed a complete system. More large-scale clinical and in-depth basic research are required to better understand the mechanisms underlying VH, which will contribute to our understanding of the pathophysiology and therapeutic options for VH.