Research Landscape of Methamphetamine-Associated Heart Failure: Insight from a Bibliometric Analysis

Background : The prevalence of methamphetamine-associated heart failure (MAHF) has increased over the last decade. The research landscape of MAHF, including institutional thought leaders and degree of cross institutional collaboration is unknown. Objectives : To identify the temporal trend in publications about MAHF, individual and institutional contributions to the field, collaboration networks, and geospatial publication patterns. Methods : A systematic literature search revealed 136 relevant articles which were then analyzed using the R bibliometrix package and the associated R Shiny app, Biblioshiny. Outcomes of interest include author betweenness, a measure of an individual author's degree of collaboration, and closeness centrality, a measure of an individual author's closeness to other authors in the scholarly network. Additionally, we mapped the location and number of publications from US institutions relative to reported MAHF prevalence from the literature. Results : Scholarly production about MAHF has increased from 0.8 publication per year pre-2015 to 9.7 publications per year from 2015-2024 (p<0.03). Low betweenness (89% of the authors had betweenness value of zero) suggests limited collaboration among co-authorship clusters and a fragmented network. Conclusions : These findings highlight the opportunity for more collaboration in the study of MAHF. Dedicated efforts to conduct multi-institutional observational studies and clinical trials are needed to enhance the quality and generalizability of research findings in the field.