Global research trends and emerging hotspots in endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty: a bibliometric and visualization...

This bibliometric study systematically explores the global research status, evolutionary trends and emerging research hotspots of endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty (ESG), aiming to clarify the future research priorities in this field. Based on the publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection from its inception to April 13, 2026, the study adopted CiteSpace 6.4.R1, VOSviewer 1.6.18 and BiblioVista software to comprehensively analyze the publication characteristics of ESG research, including publication trends, source journals, contributing countries and institutions, productive authors, citation rules, as well as keyword co-occurrence, cluster distribution and citation burst features. A total of 273 eligible publications from 95 academic journals were included in the final analysis, and the number of relevant studies has grown rapidly since 2018. Among all publication sources, Obesity Surgery contributed the most ESG-related papers, while the United States dominated the field with 154 publications and 4,463 cumulative citations. Highly cited and co-cited literatures primarily focused on the technical feasibility, weight-loss efficacy, clinical safety and long-term clinical outcomes of ESG. Keyword analysis revealed that the current research mainstream mainly covers four core themes: weight-loss outcomes evaluation, clinical safety assessment, endoscopic gastric remodeling technology, and comparative analysis between ESG and laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG). Temporal evolution and citation burst analyses further demonstrated the developmental trajectory of ESG research, which has shifted from early-stage technical exploration to clinical effect verification and comparative research, with growing attention paid to standardized clinical application in recent years. Overall, ESG research has achieved rapid development and gradually transformed toward evidence-based clinical evaluation, with current studies centering on the efficacy, safety, comparative clinical value and standardized application of the technique. Future ESG research should focus on conducting high-quality randomized controlled trials, formulating unified evaluation standards for clinical outcomes, carrying out long-term patient follow-up studies, and optimizing the scientific selection criteria for applicable patients.