Scientific mapping of hotspots and trends of post and core research based on the Web of Science: A bibliometric analysis

Post and core (PC) restoration has been widely used to restore endodontically treated teeth. Nevertheless, bibliometric studies focusing on PC research are lacking.The purpose of this bibliometric analysis was to review the general situation and determine the research direction of PC restoration by means of visualization, including the time development, countries, institutions, authors, journals, research categories, and the information of references with the strongest citation burst.The search was carried out within the topic field of the Web of Science (WoS) database. CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and R language were used to analyze the literature. Bibliometric indicators in terms of title, keyword, reference, publication time, institution, country and citation information were analyzed.Between 1966 and 2022, dental research on PC trended upward, especially in 2011 and up to 2022. Scholars in Brazil, the United States, and Italy actively participated in PC research. The country that published the most was Brazil. Italy both ranked first in the H-index and average citations per item and had cooperative relations with several countries. The United States ranked first in the world in total citation count. The University of Siena published the most articles. The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry (JPD) was the major contributing journal. The top three authors in this field were Ferrari M, Goracci C and Naumann M. The largest cooperative network of authors consisted of four Italian scholars. There were six main clusters of research topics on PC through CiteSpace co-citations. In addition, CiteSpace co-citations, CiteSpace Burst detection and VOSviewer keyword analysis showed the most important research interests, such as bond strength, fiber post, fracture resistance, and finite element analysis. Photodynamic therapy is the latest research hotspot. Finally, there were the top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts, which mainly focused on four aspects, namely, studies related to fiber posts, PC bonding strength, finite element analysis, and residual teeth and the ferrule effect.This bibliometric analysis provides a comprehensive overview of PC research, including the research time, country, institution, author, journal, article clustering, article keywords, and important literature analysis, so that researchers can have a clear understanding of the research situation in this field.