Neuroprotective effects of therapeutic hypothermia by CiteSpace-based bibliometric analysis

In recent years, neuroprotective techniques have become increasingly common in neurology. Therapeutic hypothermia, as one of the classic neuroprotective techniques, has attracted the great attention of many researchers.

CiteSpace is a software that allows for the interactive visualizations of structural and temporal patterns and trends in the scientific domain. It is widely used for the visual exploration of scientific literature. This study analyses the literature on therapeutic hypothermia and its neuroprotective use from 1992 to 2023 using CiteSpace, with data sourced from Web of Science Core Collection.

A quantitative analysis of the annual number of publications revealed a consistent upward trend since 1992, reaching a peak in 2012. Since then, the number of publications has remained at over 50 per year. In the analysis of collaborative countries/regions and institutions, we discovered that the United States has the highest number of publications among all countries, while the University of California System leads in terms of publications among all institutions. In the authors, co-cited authors analysis, and co-cited references analysis, we ranked authors and references by number of publications and citations. In the keyword and cluster analysis, it showed that the most frequently occurring keywords were mild hypothermia, moderate hypothermia, and therapeutic hypothermia. In terms of disease, hypothermia was most frequently applied to traumatic brain injury, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, and ischemic stroke.

Therapeutic hypothermia technology has great research heat in the fields of the mechanism of action, conditions and limitations of application, treatment of certain brain diseases, etc., and our study provides insights that can inform future research on therapeutic hypothermia and its neuroprotective effects.