Does research activity reflect the population burden of scoliosis? A bibliometric analysis of etiologic subtypes

Whether research output is distributed across scoliosis subtypes in proportion to their burden of disease is unknown. We characterized the scoliosis literature published from 2010 to 2025 by etiologic subtype and compared scholarly output with disease prevalence.

We searched the Scopus database for articles and reviews on scoliosis published between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2025. Records were classified by a predefined keyword algorithm into AIS, congenital, neuromuscular, degenerative/adult, syndromic, and non-adolescent idiopathic categories. The dataset was analyzed in R with the bibliometrix package.

The search returned 27,190 documents (24,335 articles [89.5%] and 2,855 reviews [10.5%]) from 79,475 authors, with annual output rising from 858 in 2010 to 2,811 in 2025. Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) was the largest named subtype, accounting for 6,818 documents (25.1% of the corpus and 43.8% of all output); 42.8% of documents could not be classified by etiology. Degenerative/adult scoliosis was second (4,176; 15.4%), grew the fastest, and had the highest mean citations per document (23.4), whereas AIS had a comparatively low mean citation rate (18.1). The AIS share of annual output remained between 20.2% and 27.2%, with no sustained directional change. Neuromuscular (11.4%), syndromic (6.0%), and congenital (3.6%) scoliosis remained comparatively small.

The distribution of scoliosis research across etiologic subtypes doesn't mirror disease prevalence. Despite the substantially greater prevalence of degenerative scoliosis in adults, publication volume remained lower than that of AIS throughout the study period. These findings suggest congenital, neuromuscular, and degenerative scoliosis as priorities for future investigation.