A Scientometric Analysis of 20 Years of Research on Breast Reconstruction Surgery: A Guide for Research Design and Journal Selection

Background Breast reconstruction refers to the rebuilding of a woman’s breast usingautologous tissue or prosthetic material to form a natural-looking breast. It is increasinglyoffered to women undergoing mastectomy for breast cancer. However, there is no systematicanalysis available for the expanding area of research on breast reconstruction.Methods A bibliometric method was used to obtain a view of the scientific production aboutbreast reconstruction by data extracted from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).Specific parameters were retrieved from the ISI. Articles about breast reconstruction wereanalyzed to obtain a view of the topic’s structure, history, and document relationships usingHistCite software. Trends in the most influential publications and authors were analyzed.Results The number of articles was constantly increasing. Most highly cited articles describedthe methods of flap construction in the surgery. Other highly cited articles discussed thepsychological or emotional aspects of breast reconstruction, skin sparing mastectomy, andbreast reconstruction in the irradiated breast.Conclusions This was the first breast reconstruction scientometric analysis, representing thecharacteristics of papers and the trends of scientific production. A constant increase in thenumber of breast reconstruction papers and also the increasing number of citations showsthat there is an increasing interest in this area of medical science. It seems that most of theresearch in this field is focused on the technical aspects of surgery.