Mapping the knowledge domains of medical textiles: A review

As the world’s textile industry shifts towards manufacturing high value-added textile structures and products, medical textiles have drawn extensive attention from researchers and the related research field is rapidly developing in recent years. To provide readers a systematic overview of this research field, a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scientific publications related to the field in performed and visually presented using the software CiteSpace and VOSviewer in this paper. Totally 2839 papers have been retrieved and collected from the core database of Web of Science™. First, the papers are divided into several groups and quantitatively analyzed based on the year of publication, the citations in each year, and the disciplines involved in the papers. VOSviewer is adopted to analyze the collaboration among countries, organizations, and authors in the research community as well as their research output and influence in terms of citation. Then the major journals in the field are identified through performing co-citation analysis on source journals of all references cited in the retrieved papers. In addition, the highly cited papers and their references are listed in this paper. They offer researchers a glimpse of the internal relationship of scientific literature and the dynamic structure of scientific evolution. Finally, the co-occurrence analysis of keywords is also performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The connection between various disciplines in the research field is revealed, so that the scientific development history, the research hotspots, and main research directions in the field can be traced.


Introduction
High value-added textile structures and products like medical textiles, protective textiles, and smart textiles have become the development trends of the textile industry worldwide. [1]iomedical textiles, also known as medical textiles, are a kind of biomedical materials that are deeply integrated with textiles, materials, biology, medicine, and other related disciplines.These materials have structural advantages which cannot be matched by other kinds of biological materials. [2]Medical textiles are textiles used in medical institutions for health care and medical treatment.According to their applications, medical textiles are divided into non-implantable, implantable, in vitro textiles and health care products.Medical textiles are divided into knitted fabrics, woven fabrics, and non-woven fabrics according to their structure. [3]Medical textiles are used to make curtains and bedding in health care environments as well as wound dressings, bandages, and other products.Medical apparel products include coveralls, shoe covers, full body suits, gloves, separate sleeves, scrubs, surgical gowns, surgical masks, and scrub caps. [4]n integrated part of the concept of textile biomedical engineering is that the role of textile devices in medical treatment is becoming more and more important with the advancement of science and technology.This is by means of drug delivery, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering and artificial implantation. [5]The advanced medical textiles segment is growing significantly with major expansions in implantation devices, medical devices, bandages, and pressure clothing, wound healing, infection control, barrier materials, controlled release, sanitary products, new smart textile products and textronis. [6]n recent years, medical textiles have drawn a lot of attention and developed rapidly in the field of textile. [7]With the aging of the population and the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the global demand for medical textiles will possibly increase in the future.
Recent published literatures mainly focus on the properties, applications, [8,9] manufacturing technology [10][11][12][13][14][15] turning process, and mechanical properties [16] of medical textiles.There are few literatures that systematically reviews medical textiles from the perspective of bibliometrics.Bibliometrics is a research method that uses metadata such as titles, authors, and their affiliates, keywords, publication types and references of publications for quantitative analysis. [17]Bibliometric data, including titles, authors, affiliations, journals, keywords, and references, can generate direct citation networks, co-occurrence networks, and The method used for collecting data is topic search.When an article contains any of the searched terms in its title, abstract or keywords, the article will be included in the collection.The formula TS = (medical textile* or medical textile* material or biomedical textile* or implantable textile* or healthcare and hygiene textile*) AND DT = (Article or Review or Early Access), Index Date = (1900-01-01 to 2023-09-25) is used to search in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).Both SCIE and SSCI belong to the core collection of Web of Science™.The search time is September 26,  2023.Totally 2839 papers were retrieved, of which the publication time ranges from the year 1979 to 2023.These papers are published in 908 journals by 3006 research organizations and 11,146 authors from 101 countries or regions.Among them, there are 2269 articles, 570 reviews, and 55 early access, which account for 79.923%, 20.077%, and 1.937% of all retrieved papers, respectively.
In this paper, CiteSpace and VOSviewer are mainly used for bibliometric analysis of the collected literatures.CiteSpace is a popular software used by many researchers worldwide to analyze literature information.It is well developed for presentation of the structure and distribution of scientific knowledge for scientific metrology, data analysis.Information can be easily visualized by the software.It also facilitates the generation of different types of knowledge graphs and visual citations of the literature landscape. [20]CiteSpace, developed by Professor Chaomei Chen, an internationally renowned expert in information visualization at Drexel University, USA, [21] refers to a Java application to visually analyze literature and co-citation networks. [22]Burst detection, mediated centrality, and heterogeneous networks regarding literate information can all be analyzed and displayed by CiteSpace.Based on the data derived from the literature, 3 main functions in CiteSpace can be used to perform visual analysis on literature.Such functions are detecting of the nature of specialized research frontiers, labeling and clustering specialized research areas, and identifying the research trends and abrupt changes.A valuable, timely, reproducible, and flexible method to track the development of research trends and to identify vital evidence can be provided by CiteSpace. [23]VOSviewer is another useful visualization tool widely used by researchers all around the world to conduct bibliographic analysis. [24]VOSviewer is based on Visualization of Similarities (VOS) technology, which has unique advantages in mapping knowledge domains, especially in the aspect of clustering. [24]VOSviewer is also capable to construct and present bibliometric maps, in which links between scientific publications, scientific journals, researchers, research organizations, countries, keywords can be constructed in the forms of co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation. [24]The number of links and the total strength of those links can be evaluated for visualization of the network. [25]n addition to CiteSpace and VOSviewer, as can be seen from Figure 1, VOSviewer is used to analyze the distribution of research strength including the collaboration distribution of countries or regions and organizations, co-citation analysis of journals, co-citation analysis of references and co-occurrence analysis of keywords.CiteSpace is used to analyze the co-occurrence cluster of keywords to determine the evolution of research hotspots, research direction and research fronts.

Yearly and citations distribution of articles
Focusing on medical textiles and other related keywords, totally 2839 articles published between the year 1979 and 2023 are retrieved from the SCIE and SSCI database.These articles have been cited for 101,167 times, and this number remains 97,778 after removing self-citation.On average, each article is cited for 35.6 times with an h-index of 135.As shown in Figure 2, according to the number of publications and citations, the time frame from 1979 to 2023 can be roughly divided into 3 stages.
Stage 1 ranges from 1979 to 2002.This stage is a long bud stage in the research area of medical textiles.There are only 78 related published articles with 292 recorded citations during these 24 years.The most cited paper published at this stage is a review with title "Review of applications for advanced 3-dimensional fiber textile composites" by "Mouritz AP" published in "Composites Part A-Applied Science and Manufacturing" in 1999.This paper has been cited 839 times till September 29, 2023.It mainly discusses the usage of various textile processes such as braiding, weaving, stitching, and knitting of 3D fiber reinforced polymer composites with their current and future potential applications. [26]tage 2 covers the years between 2003 and 2013.This stage is a leap stage in the research area of medical textiles.During this period, 479 articles related to the research area are published, and the number of citations jumped to 9243.The most cited paper is a review titled "Nanosilver: A nanoproduct in medical application" by "Chen X." published in "Toxicology Letters" in 2008, with a total number of citations of 1432 till September 29, 2023.This paper focuses on the medical use of nanosilver and related nanomaterials.Thanks to its strong antimicrobial effect, nanosilver coatings are used on various textiles as well as certain implants. [10]tage 3 starts from 2014 to 2023.This stage is exhibiting a rapid development in the research area related to medical textiles.Within only 9 years, already 2282 articles have been published and cited for 91,632 times.Of which the most cited one is an article titled "Biomimetic 4D printing" by "Gladman A. Sydney" published in "Nature Materials" in 2016.It is been cited 1868 time till September 29, 2023.This article focuses on biomimetic 4D printing of composite hydrogel structures with localized, anisotropic swelling behavior controlled by the alignment of cellulose fibrils along a defined 4D printing path. [27]

The main research areas involved
Many research areas are involved in medical textiles.The retrieved 2839 articles can be attributed to totally 105 research   The table is divided into 2 columns according to the publication year of the articles.In the rapid development stage, the research areas involved are limited to materials science, engineering, and chemistry.The data in Table 1 are retrieved from the core collection of Web of Science™, and the identification of the research areas involved in the literature is not strictly limited.

Analysis of co-authorship between countries or regions
The collaboration between countries, regions, and organizations in the world is becoming increasingly frequent and close."Research collaboration" can be defined as researchers doing research together to achieve the goal of common new scientific knowledge. [28]In practice, scientific collaboration has many forms of expression and cooperation.Scientific collaboration refers to that different authors, organizations, countries, or regions contribute themselves to an article at the same time. [29]n this paper, the co-authorship function of VOSviewer is used to analyze the collaboration relationship between countries or regions of the investigated 2839 papers.Analysis result reveals that collaboration exists among 101 countries or regions.There are totally 97 countries or regions with more than 1 citation, 61 with more than 100 citations, and 29 with more than 1000 citations.The USA is country which has the most citations, with a number of published articles of 413 and the number of citations of 23,856.China takes the second place with 550 published papers and 16,699 citations, followed by India with 354 published papers and 11,768 citations.Table 2 shows the collaboration network depicting the top 10 countries or regions with the most citations, and lists their published papers and total link strength.
A collaboration network is generated based on these 101 countries or regions as shown in Figure 3.In the figure, each node represents a country or region, and the more citations the country or region has, the larger of the node is.The total link strength represents the frequency of collaboration between a country/region and other countries/regions.As can be seen from the figure, China, the USA, India and several other countries or regions have relatively strong collaboration relationship.

Analysis of co-authorship between organizations
The co-authorship function of VOSviewer is used to analyze the collaboration relationship between organizations.From the retrieved 2839 papers there are totally 3151 organizations related to the research area of medical textiles.Among these organizations, 2892 have published papers cited more than once, 484 have published papers cited more than 100 times, and 25 have published papers cited more than 1000 times.With 46 published articles and 3117 citations, "Chinese Academy of Sciences" has the most citations, followed by "Harvard University" with 15 published articles and 3102 citations and "Indian Institute of Technology" with 24 published articles and 2888 citations.The collaboration network among the top 10 organizations with the most citations is listed in Table 3, which also lists their published articles and total link strength.
There are 73 organizations which have published papers cited over 500 times.The collaboration network among these organizations is depicted in Figure 4.Each node in the figure represents an organization, and the more citations affiliated with the organization, the larger of the node is.The total link strength stands for the frequency of the collaboration between an organizations and other organizations.Strong collaboration relations with other institutions can be found by "Chinese Academy of Sciences," "Donghua University," "Georgia Institute of Technology," "Harvard University," "Hong Kong Polytechnic University," etc.

Analysis of co-authorship between authors
Using the co-authorship function of VOSviewer to analyze the collaboration relationship between the authors of 2839 articles.The result shows that 73 authors have been cited for more than 600 times.A collaboration network among these 73 authors is generated as shown in Figure 5.In the network, each node represents an author.The more citations an author has, the larger the node representing the author is.As can be seen from Figure 5, the 73 authors are categorized into 22 small groups, and the collaboration between the groups is not frequent.These 2839 articles related to medical textiles are attributed to 11,146 authors, of which 10,846 have been cited more than once, 1047 have been cited more than 100 times, and 22 have been cited more than 1000 times.Table 4 lists the top 10 most cited authors and the number of citations.Among them, "Lewis Jennifer A." from Harvard University is the most cited author.Her has published 2 articles that have been cited 1920 times in total.The total link strength between the authors is also listed, by which larger number refers to stronger collaboration of an author with other authors.Table 5 lists the top 10 authors ranked by the number of published articles.As can be seen form the table, "Montazer Majid" from "Amirkabir University of Technology" in Iran has published the most articles.

Source journals analysis
The investigated 2839 articles are published in 908 journals, of which 836 journals have been cited more than once, and 206 journals have been cited more than 100 times, and 18 journals have been cited more than 1000 times.Table 6 gives the top 10 journals with published articles, as well as the number of citations times, impact factors and H-index of the corresponding journals.The journal "Textile Research Journal" with 77 articles is the most cited journal, followed by the Journal of "Polymers" with 67 articles.Table 7 is a list of the top 10 journals with the number of co-citations, as well as the number of citations times, impact factors and H-index of the corresponding journals.The journal with the highest number of co-citations is "Carbohydrate Polymers," with 3252 co-citations, followed by journal of "Advanced Materials" with 3233 co-citations.
Co-citation analysis of journals can help readers to understand the distribution of important knowledge in a research  field.Analyzing the co-citations and connections of journals can deliver readers an overview of how different areas of knowledge in these journals are clustered and distributed.This information can be extracted from the reference bibliography of these 2839 articles through using VOSviewer to conduct co-citation analysis.In this paper, 25,125 journals are analyzed.It shows that 278 journals are co-citation more than 100 times, and 17 journals were co-citation more than 1000 times.Figure 6 is the network diagram of co-citation of 57 journals with more than 500 times of co-citation.As shown in Figure 6, a node represents a journal, the size of the node reflects the number of co-citations of the journal.Larger the node refers to higher number of co-citations of the journal, and nodes of the same color are from the same cluster.The investigated 57 journals are divided into 3 clusters.
Cluster 1 consists of 32 red nodes.In this cluster, the journal with the highest number of co-citations is "Carbohydrate Polymers," with a co-citations number of 3252.The 5-year average impact factor of the journal is 7.536, and the number of articles related to medical textiles is 19.
Cluster 2 consists of 23 green nodes.With a co-citations number of 3233, "Advanced Materials" is the journal with the highest number of co-citations in this cluster.Its 5-year average impact factor is 28.019, and the number of articles related to medical textiles is 16.
Cluster 3 consists of 2 blue nodes.In this cluster, the journal with the highest number of 1134 co-citations is "IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters," of which the 5-year average impact factor is 4.7, and the number of articles related to medical textiles is 17.

Citation analysis of articles
The citation relationship between scientific articles shows that scientific articles are not isolated but interrelated and expanding systems.The mutual citation of scientific article reflects the objective law of scientific development and the accumulation and continuation of scientific knowledge.It is a special form of retrieval system, which can trace the source forward and the development backward through the citation network.The citation frequency of scientific article is not balanced, and the sparsity of citation network density reflects the dispersion and concentration of citation distribution. [11]Among the 2839 articles, 2543 are cited more than once, 208 are cited more than 100 times, and 6 articles are cited over 1000 times.Table 8 lists the top 10 most cited articles in the research field of medical textiles.The first one is "Biomimetic 4D printing" published by "Gladman A. Sydney" in "Nature Materials" in 2016.It has been citated 1868 times.This article mainly focuses the usage of 4D biomimetic technology to print composite hydrogel structures with localized, anisotropic swelling behavior controlled by the arrangement of cellulose fibrils along a prescribed 4D printing path. [27]The second one is "Nanosilver: A nanoproduct in medical application" published by "Chen X." in "Toxicology Letters" in 2008, and it has been cited 1432 times.This article discusses the main issues for the medical use of nanosilver and related nanomaterials. [10]On the third place is "The chemistry and applications of antimicrobial polymers: A state-of-the-art review," which is published by "Kenawy El-Refaie" in "Biomacromolecules" in 2007 and has been cited 1240 times.The research of antimicrobial polymer development is a great challenge to academia and industry, this article mainly discusses the requirements of antimicrobial polymers, factors affecting antimicrobial activity, methods of synthesizing antimicrobial polymers, applications of antimicrobial polymers in major fields, future prospect. [30]

References co-citation analysis
The concept of article co-citation analysis is proposed by Henry Small in 1973.Co-citation analysis refers to that 2 articles appear together in the reference list of a third articles, and these 2 articles form a co-citation relationship.Through mining process of the co-citation relationship of articles in the spatial data collection of articles, it can be considered as the co-citation analysis of articles. [31]Literature co-citation analysis can be used to measure the similarity of 2 articles.It can also be used to study the internal relationship of scientific literatures and describe the dynamic structure of scientific development.
These 2,839 articles have 142,378 references in total, among which 425 references have been co-citation over 10 times, and 10 references are co-citation more than 35 times.Table 9 lists the first author, publication year, co-citation times, source journal of these 10 references, respectively.The most co-citation references are "Stoppa Matteo" published in "Sensors" in 2014 with the title "Wearable electronics and smart textiles: a critical review," has been co-citation 66 times.This review highlights recent advances in the field of smart textiles, especially regarding materials for smart textiles and their manufacturing processes. [32] co-citation analysis is performed on 142 references with over 15 co-citations using VOSviewer, and a mapping of co-citation cluster of references is generated in Figure 7.As can be  seen from Figure 7, the references are divided into 5 clusters.Different clusters are represented by nodes in different colors, and each node represents a reference.The larger the node is, the more co-citations the reference has.Cluster 1 in the Figure 7 is in red.It includes 48 references, in which the most co-citation one is published by "Gao Yuan" in the journal "Textile Research Journal" in 2008, the number of co-citations is 64.
Cluster 2 is in green containing 39 references.In this cluster, the most co-citation reference is published by "Stoppa Matteo" in the journal "Sensors" in 2014, and it is co-citation for 66 times.
Cluster 3 is in blue with 26 references, in which the most co-citation one is published by "Zhu Shaozhen" in the journal "IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation" in 2009, with a number of co-citations of 48.
Cluster 4 is in yellow.It has 17 references, the most co-citation one is published by "Huang ZM" in the journal "Composites Science and Technology" in 2003, and it is been co-citation 31 times.
Cluster 5 is in purple with 12 references, its most co-citation reference is published by "Altman GH" in the journal "Biomaterials" in 2003, with a number of co-citations of 48.

Research hotspots
In 1983, Michelle Cullen proposed a concept of co-word analysis, of which the main method is to count the strength of association by the number of co-occurrences between different subject words, keywords, etc.The specific method is to count the co-occurrence frequency of subject words or keywords in a group of texts, to establish the co-occurrence matrix, to conduct distance statistics and network analysis. [33]Co-word analysis is to trace the development of science by finding the connection between various disciplines in a research field through the common occurrence frequency of words or phrases. [34]here are totally 7684 author keywords and 6151 keywords plus in these retrieved 2839 articles.After deduplication, the total number of keywords is reduced to 12,665.Keywords plus is a keyword supplemented by the core collection of Web of Science™ provider according to the content of the articles.
Using VOSviewer to analyze the co-occurrence of all keywords reveals that, there are 47 keywords with over 50 co-occurrence times, and 22 keywords with over 100 co-occurrence times.Table 10 lists the top 20 keywords with their co-occurrence times."textile" have the highest number of co-occurrences, up to 360 times, follow by "fiber" of 214 time and "silver nanoparticle" with 205 times.
Based on 70 keywords with over 35 co-occurrences times, a cluster map of keyword co-occurrence distribution is generated as shown in Figure 8.In Figure 8, 1 node represents a keyword, all nodes in the same color belong to the same cluster.The larger a node is, the higher the co-occurrence times it refers to.As can be seen from Figure 8, these 70 keywords are divided into 3 clusters.Figure 9 visualizes the co-occurrence cluster density of keywords.
Cluster 1 consists of 28 red nodes.The top 3 keywords with the most co-occurrences are "silver nanoparticle," "nanoparticles," and "antibacterial" with co-occurrence times of 205, 188, and 181, respectively.Important keywords in this cluster are "silver nanoparticles," "antibacterial activity," "chitosan," etc.This cluster mainly revolves around the application of nanomaterials and biopolymers such as chitosan and their derivatives in medical textiles."Chen X." (2008) pointed out that nanosilver is used in various textile coatings, as well as some implant coatings due to its strong antibacterial activity.The use of nanosilver in medicine is becoming more common, and due to the increased exposure, the toxicological and environmental issues of nanosilver need to be explored. [10]"Jung Kyung-Hye" (2007) explored the introduction of antibacterial activity and biocompatibility into the surface of polyethylene terephthalate textiles using electrospinning nanofiber deposition method. [12]Krishnamoorthy Karthikeyan" (2012) reported surface modification of cotton fabrics using graphene oxide nanostructures, and graphene oxide-coated cotton fabrics were more toxic to Gram-positive bacteria.[13] "El-Rafie M. H." (2014) discusses an ecological and feasible method for coating cotton fabrics with silver nanoparticless (AgNPs), regardless of the concentration of AgNPs used, without washing, with consistently high bactericidal ability.[14] "Renault F." (2009), [35] "Hamed Imen" (2016), [36] and "Senel S" (2004) [37] all mentioned that chitosan can be used in medical textiles.
Cluster 2 includes 27 green nodes.In this cluster, the top 3 keywords with the most co-occurrences are "fiber," "mechanical-properties," "composites," and the co-occurrence times are Table 9 The top 10 most co-cited references in the research area of medical textiles.

Rank Title
The 214, 151, and 149, respectively.Other important keywords in this cluster include "electrospinning," "scaffolds," "drug delivery," etc.This cluster centers on electrospinning nanoscale polymer fibers for medical applications such as in vitro and in vivo drug delivery."Subtirica Adriana-Ioana" (2018) and "Cheng Huiling" (2018) mainly introduced PEO and PVA nanofibers obtained by electrospinning process are, and the biocompatible and biodegradable polymers of such fibers are made into microfiber webs.They possess unique properties such as high surface area to volume ratio, small pore size, high porosity, and incorporation of therapeutic compounds into electrospun nanofibers. [15]Cheng Huiling" (2018) mainly introduced the biomedical applications of electrospun fibrous materials, controlled drug release from electrospun fibrous materials, and recent advances in devices to produce complex electrospun fibrous materials are highlighted.[9] Introduced a way to combine a substrate-free electrospinning process with textile technology to develop a new collector design that provides a pressure-driven localized lint structure in free space from which continuous the advantage of this textile is that it can be loaded with drugs/dyes and developed into a core-sheath structure with greater functionality.[38] Cluster 3 contains 15 blue nodes.The top 3 keywords with the most co-occurrences in this cluster are "textile," "design," "sensor," with the co-occurrence of 360, 143, and 129 times, respectively.Further important keywords in the cluster include "performance," "textile antenna," "smart textiles," etc. Thi cluster is mainly related to the medical applications of smart textiles such as wearable sensors and wearable antennas."Carpi F" (2005) introduced early concepts and recent developments in electroactive polymer-based sensors, actuators, electronic components, and power sources, which become wearable devices for smart textiles.[39] "Lin Zhiming" (2018) introduced a pressure-sensitive, large-scale, washable smart textile for bed sheets based on triboelectric nanogenerator arrays is reported for realtime and self-powered monitoring of sleep behavior.[40] "Li Yi" (2019) reviewed the theoretical basis and progress of textile biomedical engineering in recent years.[5]

Evolution of research directions and research fronts
Using the software CiteSpace to analyze the co-occurrence of keywords can be used to determine the research hotspots in a research field.Research hotspots refer to one or more topics of common concern among scholars, which have strong temporal characteristics.Co-occurrence cluster of keywords can also be used to reveal the current research directions in a research field, and this can help researchers understand the evolution of the research hotspots as well as the future research trends.
In this paper, CiteSpace is used for co-occurrence clustering of all author keywords and keywords plus.There are 8 main clusters generated, among which the information of the 8 clusters with the largest number of clustering words is shown in Figure 10 and Table 11.The number of keywords, silhouette,  and extracted LSI algorithm labels of these 8 clusters are listed in Table 11.Silhouette is used to evaluate the validity of clustering.Silhouette value greater than 0.5 indicates that a clustering is reasonable, while silhouette value over 0.7 suggests a convincing clustering.At the same time, the betweenness centrality of each keyword in the co-occurrence cluster network is calculated.Betweenness centrality is a measure of the importance of nodes in a network.The betweenness centrality of keywords is used to discover and measure the importance of keywords.Keywords with high betweenness centrality are usually the key hubs connecting 2 different keywords.By selecting top 100 levels of most co-occurrence keywords from each slice, top 10% of most co-occurrence keywords per slice, and top 45 maximum number, CiteSpace was used to calculate the author keywords and keywords plus betweenness centrality.There are 7 keywords with betweenness centrality greater than 0.1, which are textile (0.18), design (0.17), medical textile (0.13), system (0.13), film (0.12), surface (0.1), and behavior (0.1).The keyword co-occurrence cluster mapping can be switched into timeline view.In the timeline view of the keyword clustering, all keywords of the same cluster are located on the same horizontal line.The time axis of keywords appearance is set at the top of the view.The number of keywords in each cluster can be obtained in the timeline view.Larger number of keywords in a cluster indicates that the cluster is more important in the field.Meanwhile, the time span as well as its rise and fall process of each keyword in the cluster can be plotted.To further explore the time characteristics of a research field reflected by the cluster,  the important keywords in each can be measured by burst detection and betweenness centrality index.In the timeline view, the horizontal axis is the timeline, and the vertical axis stands for the clustering of different keywords.Each node represents a different burst detection keyword, and larger node refers to greater burst detection value of the keyword.Figure 11 is a timeline view of the clustering of keywords, and 1 line in the figure represents a research direction of medical textiles evolving with time.
Here, the numbers in parentheses are the co-occurrence frequency and the year of occurrence, respectively.This cluster is mainly related to the efficacy of medical textiles processing such as the addition of nanocoating to achieve antimicrobial function of textiles.
Research hotspots can be considered as one or more topics that researchers in a certain field are interested in.These topics  have strong temporal characteristics.Burst detection can be used to detect a keyword in a short period of time when the frequency of its citation surge and the keyword becomes a research hotspot.There are totally 31 burst detection keywords in the field of.The emergence and evolution of research hotspots related to medical textiles can be roughly understood through the emergence time and end time of these burst detection keywords.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Flowchart of the analysis.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Yearly distribution of publications and citations related to medical textiles.Number of citation (blue); number of publication (red); and publication year (black).

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.The mapping of countries or regions collaboration network in the research area of medical textiles.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The mapping of organizations collaboration network in research area of medical textiles.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5.The mapping of authors' collaboration network in the research area of medical textiles.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Co-citation clusters mapping of journals in the research area of medical textiles.

Figure 7 .
Figure 7.The mapping of co-citation cluster of references.

Figure 11 .
Figure 11.The timeline view of keywords co-occurrence clusters.

Figure 12
lists the burst intensity, year of occurrence, begin time, and end time of the 31 burst keywords in the research field of medical textiles.In the long bud stage(1979- 2002), "mechanical property" and "medical textile" are burst detection keywords, with strength value of 4.29 and 6.6, their appeared from 1999 to 2009.In the leap stage (2003-2013), have 10 burst detection keywords, the highest intensity burst detection keywords include "controlled release," "cellulose" and "deposition," with strength values of 6.39, 5.77, and 4.98, respectively.Their co-occurrence times are 2012-2016, 2013-2016, and 2010-2017, respectively.The remaining 19 burst detection keywords appear in the high-speed development stage, which starts from 2020 till now, with the highest intensity of "extraction" and "smart textiles," whose burst detection values are 7.22 and 6.81, respectively.
From the perspective of bibliometrics, a systematic visual analysis of researches in the field of medical textiles is conducted in this paper.A total number of 2839 articles with a publication time span from 1979 to 2023 were retrieved from core collection of Web of Science™.Since 2014, the research on medical textiles has entered a high-speed development stage, with a significant increase in both the number of articles and the number of citations.It involves 105 research areas, among which the main research areas include material science, engineering, chemistry, polymer science.The most cited article is "Biomimetic 4D printing" published in "Nature Materials" in 2016 by "Gladman A. Sydney" from "Harvard University" with 1868 citations.The software VOSviewer was used to analyze the co-authorship, co-citation, and co-occurrence of these 2839 articles.It is found that the USA, China, and India are outstanding in both the number of publications and the number of citations.Meanwhile, they have a strong collaboration relationship with other countries.The research organizations from these 3 countries are also strong.Ranked by the number of citations, the leading research organizations are "Harvard University," "Indian Institute of Technology," and "Chinese Academy of Sciences."Regarding

Figure 12 .
Figure 12.Thirty-one keywords with the strongest citation burst.

Table 1
Top 10 research areas distribution in medical textiles.

Table 2
Top 10 countries or regions ranked by the number of citations in the collaboration network.

Table 3
The top 10 organizations ranked by the number of citations in the collaboration network.

Table 4
Top 10 authors ranked by the number of citations in the collaboration network.

Table 5
Top 10 authors ranked by the number of published articles.

Table 6
Top 10 journals in the research area of medical textiles ranked by the number of articles.

Table 7
Top 10 journals in the research area of medical textiles ranked by the number of co-citations.

Table 8
The top 10 most cited articles.

Table 10
The top 20 keywords by co-occurrence times.