A Bibliometric Analysis of Robotic Surgery From 2001 to 2021

Bibliometric analyses are a method of evaluating the quality of research output in a certain domain. Robotic surgery has made vast leaps during the past 20 years and this paper aimed to assess some of the main areas of research using this method.

A search was undertaken for documents published between 2001 and 2021 from the World of Science database, using the keywords 'robotic surgery', 'robotic assisted surgery' and 'robotic-assisted surgery. Results were compared using numerous bibliometric methodologies, and stratified by source-specific metrics, author-specific metrics and country-specific metrics.

The search yielded 3839 documents, from 879 different sources. Only 2% of sources were found to be within Bradford's Zone 1 of research and the most relevant sources were from the field of urology. The Journal of Urology and Surgical Endoscopy and other Techniques ranked highly among metrics such as H, G, M index and total citations. The top-rated authors had a H index of 15 in the field of robotic surgery and the total citations reached a peak at 1342. The USA, Japan and Italy were the most productive nations and increased collaborative research is leading to a greater number of multiple-centre publications.

Research into robotic surgery is still in its infancy with further reviews of the literature and greater output through large randomised controlled trials in multiple centres through collaborative research needed.