A Bibliometric Analysis of Lower Limb Exoskeletons for Rehabilitation Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review method and a bibliometric analysis for the topic “Lower limb exoskeletons for rehabilitation applications”. The method can also be applied to other topics. Five databases were chosen for documents search, which are: Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, Catálogo de Teses e Dissertações (CTD) and Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD) of CAPES. All the results presented in this paper were obtained on December 31, 2019, as they might change with time. To make the review reproducible, updatable and continuous, a review protocol was created. Results from the secondary analysis were further analyzed, presenting the best “top 10”: most prominent research areas, most highlighted research countries, sources with the highest register of documents and, most cited documents from Web of Science and Scopus respectively. However, in the bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer tool was used for the co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling analyses, while TagCrowd was used for keywords co-occurrence analysis. The work is concluded with some important considerations observed during this analysis.