Objectives: The study aimed to conduct a bibliometric analysis of publications concerning lumbar spondylolisthesis, as well as explore its research topics and trends with machine-learning based text mining. Methods: The data were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database and analyzed in Rstudio1.3.1. Annual publication production and the top 20 productive authors over time were presented. Additionally, top 20 productive journals and top 20 impact journals were compared by spine-subspecialty or not. Similarly, top 20 productive countries/regions and top 20 impact countries/regions were compared by developed countries/regions or not. The collaborative relationship among countries and the research trends in the past decade were presented by R package 'Bibliometrix'. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis was conducted to classify main topics of lumbar spondylolisthesis. Results: Up to 2021, a total number of 4990 articles concerning lumbar spondylolisthesis were finally included for analysis. Spine-subspecialty journals were found to be dominant in productivity and impact of the field, and SPINE, EUROPEAN SPINE JOURNAL and JOURNAL OF NEUROSURGERY-SPINE were the top 3 productive and the top 3 impact journals in this field. USA, China and Japan have contributed to over half of the publication productivity, but European countries seemed to publish more influential articles. It seemed that developed countries/regions tended to produce more articles as well as high influential articles, and international collaborations focused on USA, Europe and eastern Asia. Publications concerning emerging surgical technique was the major topic, followed by radiographic measurement and epidemiology for this field. Cortical bone trajectory, oblique lumbar interbody fusion, oblique lateral lumbar interbody fusion, lateral lumbar interbody fusion, degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis, adjacent segment disease, spinal canal stenosis, minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion and percutaneous pedicle screw were the recent hotspots over the past 5 years. Conclusions: The study successfully summarized the productivity and impact of different countries/regions and journals, which should benefit the journal selection and pursuit of international collaboration for researcher who were interested in the field of lumbar spondylolisthesis. Additionally, the current study may encourage more researchers in the field and somewhat inform their research direction in the future.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2019A1515111171) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (82102640) were received in support of this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, writing of this report and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

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