Purpose: To perform a bibliometric analysis of the biomedical publications on pupil research over the past 50 years and to identify the 100 most frequently cited articles that have been influential in pupil research.
Materials and Methods: We accessed Science Citation Index Expanded provided online by the Web of Science(Clarivate Analytics, November 1918)and searched the database for articles titled with “pupil” or its derivatives that were published between 1968 and 2017, which enabled us to retrieve 3,013 articles for a bibliometric analysis. Furthermore, we counted the number of citations each article had received since its publication and determined the most-cited articles, i.e., the “pupil research citation classics.”
Results: The annual count of publications on pupil research remained about 50 until the early 2000s, followed by a steady increase to over 100 articles in the recent decade. The country of origin was mostly the United States of America(34.1%), followed by the United Kingdom(10.8%), Germany(8.4%), Japan(7.1%), and People's Republic of China(3.5%). Pupil studies have been conducted in a wide range of biomedical specialties, and their decreasing order by number of publications is ophthalmology, neurology, neurophysiology, neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and neuropsychology. Remarkable study topics included tonic pupil, fixed dilated pupil, pupillary escape, melanopsin-related pupillary reflexes, cholinergic deficiency in Alzheimer’s disease, task-evoked psychic pupillary reflexes, higher order aberration associated with cataract and refractive surgery, and application of pupillometry on the objective perimetry. The citation counts of articles ranged from 0 to 640, and the most-cited articles dealt with task-evoked pupillary responses(Beatty, 1982), Stiles–Crawford effect(Stiles and Crawford, 1933), pupil diameter and load on memory(Kahneman, 1966), pupil as a measure of emotional arousal(Bradley, 2008), and melanopsin capable of driving pupillary constriction(Lucas, 2003).
Conclusions: The bibliometric analysis indicated that diverse biomedical specialties have participated in a wide range of basic and clinical pupil studies. It is remarkable that neurophysiology and neuropsychology have become increasingly popular in the recent decade.
View full abstract