Global research landscape of artificial intelligence in orthopaedics: A decade of trends from a Scopus-based bibliometric analysis (2015–2025)

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool in orthopaedics, with its various applications. Despite increasing interest, the global research landscape, collaborative networks, and trends in AI-based orthopaedic research remain incompletely characterized. This research aims to perform a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of AI research in orthopaedics, mapping annual publication trends, document types, leading journals, authors, institutions, countries, funding agencies, and citation impact from 2015 to 2025. Methods: A Scopus-based search was conducted for published documents in AI in Orthoapedics between 2015 and 2025. Bibliographic information including publication year, document type, journal, author names, affiliations, country, funding, and citations was extracted. Descriptive statistics summarized trends, while VOSviewer (v1.6.20) visualized co-authorship, bibliographic coupling, and collaboration networks at author, institution, and country levels. Results: A total of 1629 documents were identified. Publications increased steeply after 2022, peaking in 2025 (n = 544), with original research articles (55.9 %) and reviews (20.7 %) dominating. The United States (34.8 %), China (14.1 %), and India (8.6 %) were the most productive countries. Co-authorship and bibliographic coupling analyses revealed expanding yet fragmented collaborative networks. The National Natural Science Foundation of China and the U.S. National Institutes of Health were the top funding agencies. The dataset accumulated 17,429 citations, with an h-index of 59. Conclusions: AI in orthopaedics has experienced exponential growth over the past decade, driven by high-impact institutions and collaborative networks, yet its clinical translation remains limited, highlighting the need for globally coordinated, methodologically rigorous research to fully realize its transformative potential.