Bibliometric Keyword Analysis Across Fifteen Years (2004–2018) of Knee Surgery and Related Research Articles

Abstract Background: Bibliometric is a branch of library science that uses mathematical and statistical techniques to analyze articles and the ‘keyword’ describes the most important concept of the article among the structure of the articles of journal. There was no bibliometric analysis that only analyzed the keywords of articles published in a specific single journal focusing on knee-related surgery. The authors analyzed the keywords of the articles published in the Knee Surgery and Related Research (KSRR), which is an official journal of the Korean Knee Society for the last 15 years to identify popular research topics in the field of knee.Methods: Of the 622 articles published in the KSRR from 2004 to 2018, 424 original articles were analyzed and a total of 1,703 keywords were extracted. The authors selected and classified ‘keyword categories’ to comprehensively analyze each keyword describing the same research topic. Among them, the authors selected the top 20 keywords and analyzed research concepts using related keywords. Keywords were classified by publication year to analyze the frequency and tendency of the keywords used in each study.Results: The frequency of use of the top 20 keywords accounted for 48.2% of the keywords used in the journal for the last 15 years. Excluding the keyword “knee”, which represents the affected joint, the top 5 keywords most commonly used were “total knee arthroplasty (TKA)”, “osteoarthritis”, “anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction”, “meniscus”, and “navigation”. The top 5 keywords used together with “TKA”, were “navigation”, “infection”, “management of posterior cruciate ligament”, “transfusion”, and “revision”.Conclusions: We conducted bibliometric research for the KSRR across a 15-year span. The results help define an overall command of the latest topics in knee research and provide insight for launching new projects.