Global trends and hotspots in nutritional risk screening, assessment, and diagnosis: A bibliometric and visual analysis (1991-2024).

Background and objectives: Nutrition is important in promoting health and preventing disease, while malnutrition can exacerbate disease symptoms and lead to adverse clinical outcomes in patients. The process of nutritional diagnosis and treatment includes nutritional risk screening, nutritional assessment, and nutritional therapy. This study aims to understand the number of publications, cooperation of research subjects, progress of research content, and research hotspots of nutritional risk screening and assessment, and then identify the future trends and directions of global nutritional screening.

Methods and study design: Articles on nutritional risk screening, nutritional assessment and application of nutritional diagnostic tools were identified from the Web of Science and the collected data were analysed using bibliometrics and information visualisa-tion with the help of CiteSpace software. A total of 10632 articles published between 1991 and 2024 were selected.

Results: The country with the highest number of articles was the United States; two institutions, the University of São Paulo and the Karolinska Institutet, had higher centrality and number of articles. Keyword emergent analysis revealed that global leadership initiatives on malnutrition, diagnosis, criteria, myasthenia gravis, and clinical nutrition were the five emergent terms that lasted until 2024 and were the most popular hot topics among experts and scholars.

Conclusions: We describe the characteristics of the development of nutritional risk screening and assessment studies and their trends. Currently, there is not a close collaboration between institutions and authors in the research process, while the field is trending towards more specific research and a greater focus on the disease progression in patients.