Research Status and Future Trends of Angioplasty: A Bibliometric Analysis in CiteSpace

Abstract Introduction  Angioplasty, with or without stenting, is a nonsurgical procedure to open blocked or narrowed coronary arteries due to underlying atherosclerosis. While there is ample literature on coronary heart disease research, the literature search found no bibliographic studies that quantified angioplasty studies. This study was initiated using bibliometric analysis to identify trends in angioplasty over the past twenty years. Methods  The study data was searched from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The study data included 11,429 studies published between 2001 and 2021 downloaded from the WoSCC. CiteSpace V.5.8.was used to analyze the intellectual structure and identify upcoming patterns. Results  Over the last two decades, the number of publications in this discipline has decreased. Data from 2021 did not exceed (414) and fell by half compared with 2001 (805). The keyword analysis showed that “coronary angioplasty” recorded the strongest citation burst 26.59 for the years 2001 to 2005. For the most recent data from 2018 to 2021, the strongest citation burst was recorded for the keyword “outcome” (25.64). Conclusion  This study was an exploratory attempt to identify trends in angioplasty research over the past two decades to deliver relatively unbiased and complete data on the scientific activity performed by authors worldwide. The number and percentage of published articles gradually decrease over time, which is a new finding, highlighting the need for further study of angioplasty, in particular why the trends have decreased over time.