Detecting the Interdisciplinary Nature and Topic Hotspots of Robotics in Surgery: Social Network Analysis and Bibliometric Study

Abstract

Background With the widespread application of a robot to surgery, growing literature related to robotics in surgery (RS) documents widespread concerns from scientific researchers worldwide. Although such application is helpful to considerably improve the accuracy of surgery, we still lack the understanding of the multidiscipline-crossing status and topic distribution related to RS. Objective The aim of this study was to detect the interdisciplinary nature and topic hotspots on RS by analyzing the current publication outputs related to RS. Methods The authors collected publications related to RS in the last 21 years, indexed by the Web of Science Core Collection. Various bibliometric methods and tools were used, including literature distribution analysis at the country and institution level and interdisciplinary collaboration analysis in the different periods of time. Co-word analysis was performed based on the keywords with high frequency. The temporal visualization bar presented the evolution of topics over time. Results A total of 7732 bibliographic records related to RS were identified. The United States plays a leading role in the publication output related to RS, followed by Italy and Germany. It should be noted that the Yonsei University in South Korea published the highest number of RS-related publications. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary collaboration is uneven; the number of disciplines involved in each paper dropped from the initial 1.60 to the current 1.31. Surgery; Engineering; Radiology, Nuclear Medicine, and Medical Imaging; and Neurosciences and Neurology are the 4 core disciplines in the field of RS, all of which have extensive cooperation with other disciplines. The distribution of topic hotspots is in imbalanced status, which can be categorized into 7 clusters. Moreover, 3 areas about the evolution of topic were identified, namely (1) the exploration of techniques that make RS implemented, (2) rapid development of robotic systems and related applications in surgery, and (3) application of a robot to excision of tissues or organs targeted at various specific diseases. Conclusions This study provided important insights into the interdisciplinary nature related to RS, which indicates that the researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds should strengthen cooperation to publish a high-quality output. The research topic hotspots related to RS are relatively scattered, which has begun to turn to the application of RS targeted at specific diseases. Our study is helpful to provide a potential guide to the direction of the field of RS for future research in the field of RS.

Determining the Intellectual Structure and Academic Trends of Smart Home Health Care Research: Coword and Topic Analyses

“…Researchers have combined coword analysis with cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, or social network analysis (SNA) to statistically investigate word co-occurrence patterns using titles, keywords, and abstracts [ 21 , 22 ]. In health informatics research, the combination of coword analysis and SNA has been adopted to identify the trends of specific themes in health care, such as mobile health [ 23 ], cybersecurity [ 24 ], and robotic or mixed reality surgery [ 25 , 26 ]. Accordingly, we adopted coword analysis combined with SNA to better understand key topics in smart home health care research.…”

What is robotics made of? The interdisciplinary politics of robotics research

“…In graphs created using WoS data, each node represents a WoS category while connections between nodes indicate interdisciplinary collaborations. Furthermore, clusters of cognate disciplines based on citation flows in the overall WoS corpus are represented by nodes sharing the same colour (Shen et al, 2019). For this paper, we followed Carley et al (2017) clustering of WoS categories: (1) biology and medicine, (2) psychology and social sciences, (3) chemistry and physics, (4) ecology and environmental science and technology, (5) engineering and mathematics.…”

“…"Narrow" collaborations are carried out within the framework of an epistemologically and methodologically homogeneous field; while "wide" interdisciplinarity originates from conceptually diverse areas. Consider Shen's et al (2019) analysis of interdisciplinarity in robotics surgery. One way to conceptualise it is labelling it as "narrow" interdisciplinarity, as disciplines involved (surgery, engineering; radiology, nuclear medicine, medical imaging; and neurosciences) typically share a positivist epistemological position, and often, an overarching scientific method (Kelly, 1996).…”

Exploring the Interdisciplinary Nature of Precision Medicine：Network Analysis and Visualization

“…Currently, however, scientists use social network analysis widely to evaluate collaborative interdisciplinary networks [40][41][42]. Social network analysis uses indexes such as points, lines, and links to accurately measure the degree of collaboration between disciplines and to comprehensively display a visualized network map, which can help researchers better understand the overall status of the interdisciplinarity of a specific field [43].…”