Complementary Repair Therapy as a Trending Topic in Discogenic Pain: A Bibliometric Study Over the Past 40 Years

Bibliometric analysis has been frequently employed for visualizing trends within a particular scientific domain. The pain associated with discogenic origins has a significant impact on one's quality of life, but there is currently a lack of bibliometric analysis in the literature. Hence, this study aimed to examine related research in the field and identify the latest topics that are currently trending by conducting a bibliometric analysis.

The Bibliometrix which developed in the statistical R-packages was used for the data analysis. All related eligible publications were identified, and studies published from 1982 to 2023 were extracted from the Web of Science database.

Disc repair, bone marrow cells, platelet-rich plasma, and the activation of inflammatory responses were identified as the trending topics after analyzing 977 journal articles. The most productive and influential journal was SPINE (Phila Pa 1976), which accounted for the largest publications and highest H index. The most productive and locally cited authors were Takahashi K., Ohtori S., and Aoki Y. from Chiba University. The top three productive and globally cited institutions were Chiba University, followed by University of California San Francisco and Korea University. The USA, China, and Japan were demonstrated as the most productive and globally cited countries.

This study performed the first bibliometric analysis on discogenic pain and provided valuable insights into the latest trending topics in the field. Analysis reveals that recent research has primarily focused on complementary and regenerative approaches for repairing painful discs, as well as the role of inflammatory responses in disc pathology.