Bibliometric and visual analysis of research hotspots and future prospects in the study of amblyopia

Purpose: To perform a bibliometric analysis in the field of amblyopia research to examine current global trends and future research hotspots and compare contributions from different countries, institutions, authors and journals. Methods: Literature related to amblyopia published from 1 January 2000, to 31 December 2024, was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database. The language of the included studies was limited to English, and the types of publications were articles and reviews. Visualization and bibliometric network analysis were performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. A cooperation network among countries, institutions, authors and journals was drawn. We conducted co-occurrence analysis on the keywords to identify the research hotspots. Results: A total of 4714 papers on amblyopia were identified from 2000 to 2024. In 2000, only 81 papers were published; however, by 2024, 292 papers had been published. Over the past 25 years, a total of 3618 universities or institutions in 94 countries or regions have published research papers related to amblyopia. The United States ranked first with 1607 papers, followed by China and England. McGill University published the most research papers on amblyopia, with 166 published papers, accounting for 3.5% of all publications on the subject. The top three journals contributing to this field were the Journal of Aapos, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science and the Journal of Pediatric Ophthalmology & Strabismus. Binocular iPad games, ocular dominance plasticity and research on the visual cortex of the brain will become future research hotspots in this field. Conclusion: In this work, the publications were primarily from the United States and Europe.Plasticity of the visual cortex and the dominant eye has received attention from researchers in the field of amblyopia, and new technologies such as virtual reality technology have begun to be applied to treat amblyopia. This study reveals the hotspots and trends in this field through bibliometric analysis.