Bibliometric analysis of infertility psychology: current status, hotspots, and emerging trends (2014-2024)

The mental health concerns associated with infertility, encompassing conditions such as anxiety, depression, and stress, are of paramount importance. However, bibliometric analyses employing tools like CiteSpace and VOSviewer to study this domain have been notably lacking.

This research aims to fill this gap by employing these tools to analyze the current state, hotspots, and trends in infertility psychology, thereby offering a comprehensive review to assist researchers in navigating the research landscape.

Using Web of Science Core Collection as the data source, search for articles on psychological research on infertility patients from 2014 to 2024, and conduct bibliometric analysis using Microsoft Office Excel 2019, VOSviewer software, and CiteSpace. And draw tables and trend charts, generate network maps, cluster maps, etc., to evaluate relevant literature information, such as authors, countries, institutions, and keywords. In addition, use Price's law to calculate the number of core authors.

A total of 324 articles related to the research on infertility psychology were retrieved. We observed that the number of publications has increased with fluctuations. The United States ranks first in terms of the overall research strength in this field. Review literature has the highest number of citations, and most of the research topics in the cited literature are related to stress, depression, anxiety, and so on. Keywords and clustering analysis indicate that, in the past decade, research has gradually been carried out on multiple dimensions around the psychological conditions of this group, such as group psychological interventions, birth cohort studies, the relationship between couples, measurement tools, and so on.

The results of this study provide a scientific and comprehensive overview of the development of psychological research on infertility patients, enabling relevant authors and research teams to understand the current research status in this field. At the same time, the mental health of infertile patients is closely related to the sexual function of both spouses, and it is particularly important to use the Internet to intervene. Exploring hot topics and cutting-edge directions can also guide researchers to seek new perspectives and directions, such as groups, couples, interdisciplinary intersections, and so on.