A Bibliometric Vision on Triage in the Emergency Department

Aim: Triage is an indispensable process in the emergency
department. Bibliometrics and visual analysis were performed
in this study to look at the hotspots and future prospects in
triage research, with the aim of giving researchers some useful
recommendations.
Material and Method: This study was based on bibliometric
methods, which have two main uses: scientific analysis and
mapping. The data retrieved on a single day, 15 June 2022. The
search keywords, in the title, entered into the database were
triage and emergency room or emergency department, and
document type was article. From 1970 through 2021, the data
were gathered from the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection
database. The retrieved data transferred to Excel 2010 and
VOSviewer programs for further analyses.
Results: By searching for the title words in WOS database, firstly
a total of 1538 publications were retrieved between 1970–
2021. Of these documents, only articles were evaluated due
to their high scientific value (n=999; 64.95%). The first article
was published in 1970. There was a peak in the number of
publications since 2000s. The highest number of publications
published in the year 2021. The most prolific countries were
the United States of America (USA) (n=317; 31.73%), Canada
(n=87; 8.71%) and Australia (n=79; 7.91%). The most prolific
institutions were the League of European Research Universities
(LERU) (n=82; 8.21%), Harvard University (n=45; 4.51%) and
the University of California system (n=34, 3.40%). Although
Canadian publications had the most citations per article, the
United States had the most publications and the highest
H-Index.
Conclusions: This is the first bibliometric study to give
comprehensive description on the published emergency
triage literature. The number of papers on emergency triage
has grown over time, however there have been few research
in this area.