Global research trends and developments in female infertility: a systematic bibliometric analysis and network visualization of 9288 studies

Abstract Objective Female infertility has remained a significant health issue over the years. This study was conducted to analyze the key bibliometric indicators and plot the global research on female infertility. Methods A systematic bibliometric study was designed. The Web of Science Core Collection and MEDLINE databases were used to retrieve the relevant studies on the subject. The following search keywords were used: “female infertility” OR “women infertility” OR “woman infertility” OR “fertility in women” OR “fertility in woman” OR “infertile women” OR “infertile woman” OR “sterile women” OR “sterile woman” in the topic field. The retrieved records were downloaded in plain text and BibTeX formats. The downloaded datasets were imported into the R package to remove the duplicates and perform the bibliometric analysis and science mapping. Results A total of 9288 articles were included in the final analysis. These articles were written by 39,453 authors and were published in 1898 journals between 1939 and 2024. The international co-authorship was 13.34%, whereas the annual growth rate was 8.01%. The most frequently published year was 2024 ( n = 698). The top leading journal was “Fertility and Sterility” ( n = 802), whereas the most contributing author was Wang Y ( n = 65). The most frequently appeared author keywords other than search terms were endometriosis, in vitro fertilization, pregnancy, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometrium, and laparoscopy. The top leading institutions were Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Fudan University, and Shandong University, whereas Yale University, the University of California San Francisco, and Fudan University had the highest betweenness centrality score. China was the leading country in terms of single corresponding author countries, whereas the United States of America (USA) was the most cited country. Moreover, China had the strongest collaboration with the USA. Conclusion The current study provides a comprehensive assessment of female infertility studies over the past eight decades. Recent trend topics during the last decade were infertile women, ovary syndrome, polycystic ovary, in vitro fertilization, and embryo transfer. The well-developed and central themes were in vitro fertilization, randomized control studies, embryo transfer, assisted reproductive technology, pregnancy outcomes, and live birth.