Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Currently, there are many problems that need to be solved in tendon repair research, including mechanism research of tendon suture and adhesion, exaltation the quality of tendon healing, improvement of suture materials and methods, study on tensile strength between joint of tendon, as well as biomaterials of tissue-engineered tendon. These are important issues that affect the research and development of tendon repair.
OBJECTIVE: To assess the trend of the academic literature in the field of the material for repair of tendon injuries and to provide reference for depth analysis by using Web of Science database.
DESIGN: Bibliometric data analysis.
DATA RETRIEVAL: An electronic search was performed by the first author in Web of Science database for related literature of material in repair of tendon injury using the key words of “tendon injury”, “material” and “repair”, from 2002-01 to 2011-12, to describe its distribution characteristics.
SELECTION CRITERIA: Peer-reviewed study on material for repair of tendon injuries of published literature, including the type of document of article, review, proceeding paper. Exclusive criteria: ①The article need to be collected by manual searches and phone retrieval. ②Unpublished papers. ③Correction.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS: In SCI database, academic journal articles published year, literature number, subject category, type of document, authors, source journals, proceeding paper, institutions, distribution of the country and region, distribution of the funds, language of Journal, literature citations were analyzed.
RESULTS: ①A total of 156 research literature related to material for repair of tendon injuries were retrieved in Web of Science database in the past 10 years. There are 141 articles and 13 reviews. From the trends of the number of literature, the number of papers was gradually increased. The number of related literatures in this field reached a peak in 2009 (n=28). The studies were focused on bone science and surgery, followed by sports science and engineering. ②American Journal of Sports Medicine, Foot Ankle International and Archives of Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery were three journals that published most of articles on repair of tendon injury. Most literatures were published by United States, accounting for 42.9% of all literatures. China ranked the 5th in the number of literature in past 10 years (n=9, 5.8%). ③Researches on materials for repair of tendon injuries were mainly supported by NIH. The articles with highest citations were mainly published on Journal of Cellular Physiology and Cytokine & Growth Factor Reviews.
CONCLUSION: Literature analysis shows that repair materials for tendon injuries tend to be mature in recent years; the number of literature is steady and shows an increasing trend, which is the focus research in orthopedics, surgery and sports medicine.