Specialty representation and interdisciplinary collaboration in hand surgery research over four decades

Abstract

Introduction:

Hand surgery is a multidisciplinary field involving surgical and rehabilitation disciplines. Although clinical care often requires collaboration between specialties, the academic structure of hand surgery research and the relative contributions of different disciplines remain incompletely characterized. We studied specialty representation and patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration in hand surgery literature over four decades.

Methods:

A cross-sectional bibliometric analysis was done on publications indexed in PubMed from six dedicated hand surgery journals between 1980 and 2025. Bibliographic metadata were retrieved through automated database queries and author affiliations were analysed using computational text pattern matching to classify specialties represented in each publication. Specialty representation and interdisciplinary collaboration were assessed across the decades.

Results:

A total of 22,021 publications were identified, of which 18,229 contained analysable affiliation data. Orthopaedic surgery represented the most frequent specialty involvement, followed by hand surgery units and plastic surgery. Plastic surgery maintained a relatively stable proportion across the decades despite reports of declining participation in hand surgery training. Interdisciplinary collaboration increased substantially over time, with a fivefold increase in multi-specialty publications across the decades. Hand therapy was the most frequent non-surgical collaborator and surgeon–hand therapist publications increased progressively over the study period.

Conclusion:

Hand surgery research has evolved toward greater interdisciplinary collaboration. Orthopaedic surgery remains the most represented specialty, while plastic surgery maintains a stable academic contribution. These findings support the concept of hand surgery as a shared academic domain in which collaboration between surgical and rehabilitation disciplines may drive future innovation and improvements in patient outcomes.