A comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature between 1945 and 2024 about urinary tract echinococcosis.

Background: Echinococcosis is a parasitic disease caused by Echinocccus granulosus and Echinococcus multilocularis and declared a neglected tropical disease by the World Health Organization. The disease is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in India, Australia, China, Turkey, South America, the Middle East, and Eastern European countries. Bibliometric analysis is a popular research trend that gains the advantage of evaluating all the studies about one specific topic and emphasizing the importance and place of the subject in the literature. With this study, we aim to evaluate all the global published literature in the Web of Science core collection database about urinary tract echinococcosis between 1945 and 2024.

Methods: All documents indexed in the Web of Science core collection database between 1945 and 2024 were scanned on March 29, 2024. VOSviewer program 1.6.20 and MS Office Excel 2017 programs were used for forward analysis.

Results: 152 documents were obtained, 102 of which were indexed in SCI-Expanded journals. Turkey (21.71%) was the leading country in terms of the total number of documents, followed by India (21.05%), but citations of Indian publications were higher (21.77%). Spain was in the first rank in terms of average citations per document (19.33). Most of the documents were original articles (78.29%). Okan Akhan was the most prolific author, with three documents. The most-cited document was conducted in 1997 by Angulo et al. and received 74 citations. With seven publications, Urology Case Reports was the journal that published the most documents on urinary tract echinococcosis.

Conclusions: Evaluating the studies on urinary system echinococcosis with bibliometric analysis, it is understood that although the number of studies has gradually increased over the years, they are still less than expected. We recommend that more studies be conducted to determine the true prevalence of echinococcosis and ensure more effective management of the disease, especially in countries where it is endemic.