Mapping the Nursing Literature on Postoperative Delirium: A Bibliometric Analysis

To provide a structured, macroscopic overview of nursing research on postoperative delirium through bibliometric analysis, assessing its characteristics and progress.

Bibliometric analysis study.

For the bibliometric analysis study, the Web of Science database was selected, and the data analyzed was included until August 28, 2024. The analysis was performed using the "Biblioshiny" application available in the Bibliometrix R package.

Between 1977 and 2024, 535 nursing articles on postoperative delirium were published in 313 sources. When examining the annual scientific output of nursing studies on postoperative delirium, the most prolific journals were found to be Journal of Clinical Nursing (n = 18), Journal of Perianesthesia Nursing (n = 13), and Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (n = 13). According to Bradford's law-based analyses, there are 313 productive journals in the nursing literature on postoperative delirium. These journals are distributed as follows: 29 in the first zone, 108 in the second zone, and 176 in the third zone. Authors and articles were organized according to Lotka's law. The majority (88.9%) of the authors (n = 2,486) had 1 article, 8.7% had 2 articles (n = 243), and 1.5% had 3 articles (n = 43), while 0.2% (n = 7) had more than 5 publications. Recent trends show a shift toward research on recovery, guidelines, and 3 outcomes, with studies on experience, impact, and cardiac surgery. The countries with the highest number of publications were identified as the United States, Germany, and China. Global collaborations on this topic were: United States-Canada (n = 8), United States-Germany (n = 7), United States -United Kingdom (n = 7).

This bibliometric study provides a comprehensive and integrative review of the global literature on postoperative delirium in nursing.