Surgical Human-Robot Interaction: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore human-robot interaction in surgical contexts using bibliometric analyses. We demonstrate the use of various scientometric tools for a bibliometric review and discuss some trends in robotic surgeries. Metadata was extracted from three databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar through Publish or Perish software. A one-way analysis of variance and Tukey’s post hoc test were used to observe any significant differences in database publication yields. Different trend analyses were conducted on metadata with tools including Vicinitas and Google NGram, Co-citation network analyses were also carried out with VOSviewer and CiteSpace. Finally, MAXQDA was used for a content analysis using a subset of 27 articles. The review showed that surgical robotics is a heavily growing field as seen with the uptake of robotic surgeries over other conventional techniques. Findings of current trends in the field are also presented. Finally, we discuss ideas for future work on both technical and non-technical aspects of surgical robotics.