Cureus. 2026 Jun 10;18(6):e110620. doi: 10.7759/cureus.110620. eCollection 2026 Jun.
ABSTRACT
Deglutition disorders and cognitive impairment co-occur frequently in older adults and in patients with neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular disease, yet the intellectual structure and collaborative patterns at this clinical interface have not been mapped. We performed a bibliometric analysis, with scoping-review-style charting, of publications indexed in the Scopus database through the search date of 10 October 2025; we retrieved 1,190 records and retained the 100 most-cited articles for in-depth analysis. Because the most recent publications (2023-2025) have not yet accrued sufficient citations, the resulting top-100 corpus spans 2009-2022. Articles were stratified into three citation tiers: Hyperclassics (≥500 citations, n = 11), Top-Class (250-499 citations, n = 20), and Classics (100-249 citations, n = 69). Performance analysis and science mapping were conducted in R version 4.4.2 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) using the bibliometrix and biblioshiny packages (open-source; https://www.bibliometrix.org/). Continuous variables were compared using the Kruskal-Wallis test followed by post hoc Mann-Whitney U tests; categorical variables with the chi-squared test and Cramér’s V; and correlations among journal indicators with Spearman’s rho and 95% confidence intervals derived via Fisher’s z-transformation. The corpus accumulated 30,872 total citations (range 112-4,312). Stroke was the leading venue (6 articles; 7,909 citations; 25.6% of the corpus), and the United States contributed 32 articles representing 47% of all citations, followed by the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, and Germany. Hyperclassics significantly out-cited Classics in both total citations and citations per year (both p<0.0001) but not in author count or active years. Inter-metric correlations among Journal Impact Factor (JIF), CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) were uniformly strong (ρ>+0.84; all p<0.001), whereas correlations between these journal-level indicators and article-level citations were weak (ρ +0.22 to +0.29; all p<0.05). Keyword co-occurrence resolved three thematic clusters-stroke, dementia, and dysphagia (clinical burden and nutrition); Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders; and neurological symptoms, cognition, and diagnostic imaging-while a complementary thematic-evolution analysis traced eight finer research streams. The field is dominated by stroke-related research and Anglo-American academic medicine, with a small set of influential guidelines driving disproportionate citation weight. Within this most-cited corpus, articles centred explicitly on the dysphagia-cognition interface were comparatively few (14% of the corpus), whereas disease-context and guideline records predominated; sensitivity analyses excluding peripheral records preserved the thematic and geographic structure. Estimating under-representation relative to clinical burden would require a field-normalised denominator and is proposed as future work. Future work should prioritize mechanistic neuroimaging in cognitively impaired patients, validated screening instruments adapted for dementia and parkinsonism, and comparative-effectiveness trials of dysphagia interventions across diagnostic categories.
PMID:42434674 | PMC:PMC13354282 | DOI:10.7759/cureus.110620
