Global Scientific Trends in Virtual Reality for Pain Treatment From 2000 to 2022: Bibliometric Analysis

Xun Yang; Sen Zhong; Sheng Yang; Meng He; Xu Xu; Shisheng He; Guoxin Fan; Lijun Liu

doi:10.2196/48354

Global Scientific Trends in Virtual Reality for Pain Treatment From 2000 to 2022: Bibliometric Analysis

JMIR Serious Games. 2023 Nov 14:11:e48354. doi: 10.2196/48354.

Authors

Xun Yang¹, Sen Zhong², Sheng Yang², Meng He¹, Xu Xu¹, Shisheng He², Guoxin Fan³, Lijun Liu¹

Affiliations

¹ 1, Department of Traumatic Orthopedics, Shenzhen Second People's Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital, Shenzhen University; Shenzhen Translational Medicine Institute), Shenzhen, China.
² Department of Orthopedic, School of Medicine, Spinal Pain Research Institute, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
³ Department of Pain Medicine, National Key Clinical Pain Medicine of China, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen, China.

PMID: 37991981
PMCID: PMC10686536
DOI: 10.2196/48354

Abstract

Background: Virtual reality (VR) is a computer simulation technique that has been increasingly applied in pain management over the past 2 decades.

Objective: In this study, we used bibliometrics to explore the literature on VR and pain control, with the aim of identifying research progress and predicting future research hot spots.

Methods: We extracted literature on VR and pain control published between 2000 and 2022 from the Web of Science Core Collections and conducted bibliometric analyses. We analyzed the publication and citation trends in the past 2 decades, as well as publication and citation analyses of different countries, institutions, journals, and authors. For references, we conducted cocitation and burst analyses. For keywords, we conducted co-occurrence, clustering, timeline view, and citation burst analyses.

Results: Based on 1176 publications, we found that there was a continuous increase in publication and citation volumes, especially in the last 5 years. The United States was the most representative country, and the University of Washington was the most representative institution, with both having the most publications and citations. The most popular journal in this field was Burns, and Hoffman HG was the most productive author, leading many studies on patients with burn pain. The reference with the most citation burst was a study on the verification of new hardware in pain control. The keywords with the highest citation bursts related to various situations of pain such as "burn pain," "wound care," "low back pain," and "phantom limb."

Conclusions: VR has been applied in various clinical situations for pain management, among which burns and pediatric surgery have achieved satisfactory results. We infer that VR will be extended to more clinical pain situations in the future, such as pain control in wound care, low back pain, and phantom limb pain. New research hot spots will include the development of software and hardware to improve the immersive experience of VR for pain control. However, our work was based solely on English literature from the Web of Science database. For future studies, we recommend that researchers explore literature from multiple databases to enhance the scope of their research.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometrics; pain management; research trends; virtual reality.