Trends In Small Incision Lenticule Extraction Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

To characterize the articles in the field of small incision lenticule extraction using a bibliometric analysis method.

Department of Ophthalmology, Bogomolets National Medical University, Kyiv, Ukraine.

The search was conducted within articles and review articles indexed by Clarivate Web of Science Core Collection using the following query: (TI=(SMILE) AND TS=(refractive surgery)) OR TS=("Small Incision Lenticule Extraction") OR TS=("Small incision refractive lenticule extraction"). The upper timespan limit was 2021, no language restrictions were chosen. The retrieved data were processed with the built-in functions "Analyze Results" and "Citation Report", as well as with HistCite 12.03.17 software.

A total of 715 papers were evaluated (650 articles and 65 review articles). The top 3 countries were China (41.5%), the USA (19.4%), and Germany (11.6%). Most papers were written in English (96%). Fudan University (13.3%), Tianjin Medical University (7.7%), National University of Singapore (6.3%), and Singapore National Eye Centre (6.3%) were the most prolific. The average yearly growth rate was 66%, and the production was adjusted better to linear (R²=0.916) than exponential growth (R²=0.82). There were a total of 11351 citations (average: 15.9/item). The h-index of the query was 49, and the h10-index was 293. The most productive author, Zhou XT, had 86 papers, while 967 authors out of 1542 (62.7%) had only one publication on this topic.

The amount of literature on small incision lenticule extraction has grown linearly over time. The majority of authors had only one article, while the minority publish the predominant amount of papers on this topic.