Foot osteoarthritis research: A bibliometric analysis

Objective

To conduct a bibliographic analysis of English language, non-surgical research pertaining to foot osteoarthritis (OA).

Design

A Scopus® database search was conducted to identify all non-surgical foot OA articles published in English up until December 2023. Bibliometric analysis was performed using an open-source tool based on the R language. Citations, journals, authors, institutions, and countries were described. Publications were manually categorised according to research type and funding source.

Results

The search strategy yielded 121 eligible articles, which received a total of 4531 citations and were published by 372 authors in 55 journals. The highest publication output occurred in the past decade. The most frequent journals were Arthritis Care & Research, Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Foot & Ankle International and Journal of Foot and Ankle Research. The most published institutions were Keele University, La Trobe University, the University of Leeds, the University of Melbourne and the University of North Carolina. Of the 106 articles that could be classified, most were focused on aetiology (n=52, 49%), followed by evaluation of treatments and therapeutic interventions (n=28, 26%), detection, screening and diagnosis (n=17, 16%), health and social care services research (n=6, 6%) and underpinning research (3, 3%). Fifty-one articles (42%) reported no research funding.

Conclusion

Foot OA research has increased significantly in the past decade. There is a need, however, to improve our understanding of the condition and to address the relatively small number of clinical trials that have been conducted.