BACKGROUND: Medical biomaterial is a new type of material which can be used in diagnosis, treatment, and repairing or replacing the lesion tissues or organs to improve their functions. Medical biomaterial has become a basic discipline in research of artificial organs and medical devices.
OBJECTIVE: To analyze the literatures on abdominal wall repair materials, suture materials or hemostatic materials used in general surgery and to evaluate the overall trend in this field to provide a reference for further research in the field.
DESIGN: Bibliometric analysis based on different retrieval types.
DATA RETRIEVAL: A search of related literatures was performed in Web of Science database from January 2006 to December 2010 using the key words of “surgery, patch, suture material, hemostasis material/hemostatic material/hemostasia material” in English. The retrieval results were analyzed, and the trends were described in words and graphics.
SELECTION CRITERIA: The literatures included articles, reviews, technical studies, proceedings papers and letters. Unpublished articles, meeting abstracts, book chapters, news and those needed to be obtained by manual or phone search were excluded.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS: The literatures were analyzed by national distribution, institutional information, foundation supporting, publish year, discipline distribution, and citation frequency.
RESULTS: The number of literatures on patch was the most in Web of Science database, which was 1 302. Articles published by authors from USA were the most, including 395 papers about patch, 199 about suture material, and 144 about hemostatic material. China has occupied an important position in the international research of these materials.
CONCLUSION: The research of biomaterial is becoming more mature, and the number of literatures in this field is increasing. Patch material is the research hot in recent years.