Comprehensive and Visualized Analysis of Interventional Clinical Trials of Spinal Cord Injury in the Past Two Decades: A Bibliometric Study.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to provide a bibliometric analysis of reported clinical trials of interventional spinal cord injury (SCI) and present the current status, global trends, and scholars' knowledge in this field.

METHODS: Data were obtained from PubMed and Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. A literature screening process was conducted to select reports of interventional SCI clinical trials. Qualitative and quantitative analysis was performed based on information from the WOS database. Co-occurrence analysis of keywords, collaboration analysis, and co-citation analysis were performed using VOSviewer.

RESULTS: A total of 849 articles were selected for analysis. Therapeutic strategies in the articles were classified into 10 subgroups. Locomotor training, local complication-related treatments, and neuromodulation are the top 3 subgroups. Spinal Cord was the most productive and most frequently cited journal in SCI clinical trials. The most productive country, institution, and author are the United States, the University of Miami, and Harvey LA, respectively. The collaboration network analysis shows that researchers and institutions from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia were the pivotal driving forces in this field. Spinal cord injury, rehabilitation, individuals, electrical stimulation, and exercise are the top 5 most frequent keywords. The co-citation analysis shows that the most frequently cited references are all international standards and guidelines of SCI clinical trials.

CONCLUSIONS: There is a broad research collaboration network, although it is distributed unevenly worldwide. International standards and guidelines are needed to conduct high-quality clinical trials in the future.