Global Trend in Cryptorchidism: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

Cryptorchidism means that the testicle does not descend to its original place before birth, which is the most common male genital abnormality. Its prevalence is up to 3% in full-term babies and up to 30% in premature babies, and the complications of an undescended testicle can be infertility and testicular cancer. Its most important risk factors are prematurity, low birth weight, family history, and alcohol and cigarette consumption by the mother. The most obvious symptom in diagnosing the disease is the absence of testicles in the scrotum. The treatment of cryptorchidism is orchidopexy surgery. With timely diagnosis and proper treatment, its prognosis is excellent. Scientometrics is a part of science that deals with the analysis of scientific articles and citing them in a selected sample of scientific journals. Scientometrics is at the border between research and the decision-making, policy-making and evaluation processes that underlie research. The purpose of this research is to review the published studies in the field of undescended testis and evaluate them to determine the countries, institutes and pioneer researchers in this field. Materials and methods: In this scientometric study, articles published in the Scopus database will be analyzed. Searches will be conducted in the Scopus database and among the titles of the articles. For the scientometric analysis of the selected evidence in the first stage, the on-add Biblioshiny app program of the R software was used, and also a visual analysis of scientific mapping will be performed on the fields of knowledge such as the main research fields and the networks between them. Results: In this study, 2431 articles related to cryptorchidism were selected from 1945 to 2023, published in 770 journals. The annual growth rate of the production of articles was 5.03%. 7347 authors contributed in writing these articles. An author with highest article in this field was Faruk Hadziselimovic with 36 articles, which had H-index and G-index equal to 18 and 32, respectively. The journal with the most articles was JOURNAL OF UROLOGY with the number of 109 articles, which had the highest H-index and G-index equal to 42 and 69, respectively. Among the countries, the United States of America is the most productive country with 102 articles, and Iran ranks 16th with 16 articles.