Published online Aug 19, 2021. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v11.i8.491
Peer-review started: November 29, 2020
First decision: March 16, 2021
Revised: March 29, 2021
Accepted: July 5, 2021
Article in press: July 5, 2021
Published online: August 19, 2021
Processing time: 256 Days and 6.7 Hours
Visual hallucination (VH) refers to a spontaneous visual perception without corresponding external stimuli and often occurs in ophthalmological and neuropsychiatric disorders. It is associated with poor life quality, increased patient hospitalization, and nursing home admission.
To date, there is a lack of scientometric analysis of the research on VH.
To objectively summarize the features of VH research and gain insights into the emerging trends for research on VH.
CiteSpace V was used in this article. Publication outputs, document types, geographic distributions, co-authorship status, research hotspots, and co-citation status were analyzed. A total of 2176 original articles and 465 reviews were included in the database downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection.
The results showed that most publications can be classified into neurology, sports and ophthalmology studies. In addition, North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia published the most documents. Some well-known authors have always had a leading role in this field; meanwhile, new authors keep emerging. A relatively stable cooperation has been formed among many authors. Furthermore, neuropsychiatric symptom and functional connectivity are the top hotspots. Research on VH in dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson’s disease (PD) have received much attention.
Studies on VH in PD are likely to be the new emerging trends in the future, especially the mechanism of VH.
More large-scale clinical and in-depth basic research studies are required to better understand the mechanisms underlie VH, which will contribute to our understanding of pathophysiology and therapy in VH.