Exploring research trends and hotspots of infantile hemangioma with slope graphs: Moving beyond traditional spot trend views.

BACKGROUND: Infantile hemangioma (IH) is a noncancerous tumor commonly observed in pediatric patients, characterized by the proliferation of endothelial cells. Despite numerous studies on IH, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis and synthesis of research trends. This study aims to: examine the applicability of slope graphs in bibliometrics; identify the most significantly dominant entities; and determine if the h-indexes are consistent across all IH-related articles and the top 100 cited IH (T100IH) articles. METHODS: A comprehensive collection of IH-related publications from 2014 to 2023 was obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection, resulting in a total of 2000 articles. The analysis was conducted in 2 parts: the overall dataset of 2000 publications and a subset of the T100IH articles. An online R platform was used to analyze the data. The study findings were presented using various visual displays, including: performance analytics; trends and spot analyses for entities over the years using slope graphs; and impact beam plots for T100IH. The absolute advantage coefficient >0.70 was applied to identify significantly dominant entities over the next 2 counterparts. RESULTS: Slope graphs provided more valuable information, demonstrating superiority over traditional spot trend views. The most dominant elements in each aspect were: the United States, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, the Dermatology department, author Yi Ji from China, the journal of Pediatric Dermatology, the year 2015, type of article, research area of Dermatology, and the keyword CHILDREN. The overall h-index was 47, slightly lower than the T100IH h-index of 49, as T100IH contains articles with Digital Object Identifier only. The journal of Pediatric Dermatology presented significantly dominant (i.e., absolute advantage coefficient = 0.80 > 0.70). Article type and journal are significantly dominant over time, particularly before 2020. CONCLUSIONS: The use of slope graphs proved to be highly effective in generating insightful research trends and hotspots. This study suggests that slope graphs, which provide superior insights compared to traditional spot trend views, should be embraced as a valuable tool in future bibliometric analyses.