Research on the Potential Biomarkers of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: a Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis.

ABSTRACT

Reliable diagnostic methods for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) are lacking, and many researchers continue to search for objective biomarkers that can both define and detect mTBI. Although much research has been conducted in this field, there have not been many bibliometric studies. In this study, we aim to analyze the development over the last two decades in scientific output relating to the diagnosis of mTBI. To do this, we extracted documents from Web of Science, PubMed, and Embase and performed descriptive analysis (number of publications, primary journals, authors, and countries/regions), trend topics analysis, and citation analysis for papers across the globe, with a particular focus on molecular markers. One thousand twenty-three publications spanning 390 journals were identified on Web of Science, PubMed, and Embase for the period from 2000 to 2022. The number of publications increased every year (from 2 in 2000 to 137 in 2022). Of all the publications we analyzed, 58.7% had authors from the USA. Our analysis shows that molecular markers are the most studied markers in the field of mTBI diagnostics, accounting for 28.4% of all publications, and that the number of studies focused on this specific aspect has increased sharply in the past 5 years, indicating that molecular markers may become a research trend in the future.