Ketamine and esketamine research in children and adolescents: a bibliometric and thematic analysis of the anesthesia–sedation–analgesia and psychiatry research landscape

Abstract

Background: Pediatric ketamine/esketamine research spans anesthesia, sedation, analgesia, and, more recently, psychiatry. By integrating both clinical domains within a single pediatric corpus, this study compared their relative temporal and thematic positions and mapped the intellectual and collaborative structure of the combined field. Methods: Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus were searched through August 2026. After deduplication and eligibility screening, 1,152 English-language articles and reviews published between 1969 and 2026 were analyzed using performance analysis, science mapping, Bradford’s and Lotka’s laws, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. Results: The corpus comprised 4,502 authors, 461 journals, and 27,607 citations; 61.8% of publications appeared during 2011–2026. Anesthesia–sedation–analgesia dominated the historical and thematic structure, with seven LDA topics accounting for 86.8% of dominant assignments. The psychiatry-related topic, centered on adolescent depression and esketamine, was dominant in 3.0% of publications overall, while its mean topic share increased to approximately 10% in the partial 2024–2026 period; the latter estimate is provisional pending complete indexing. Co-citation and bibliographic coupling analyses indicated a shared knowledge base, whereas author collaboration remained sparse and fragmented. Conclusions: Pediatric ketamine/esketamine research has evolved from an established anesthesia–sedation–analgesia base toward more specialized clinical questions, while psychiatry remains a smaller but rapidly expanding domain. However, increasing bibliometric visibility in pediatric psychiatry should not be equated with clinical efficacy or maturity of the evidence base; larger, longer-term multicenter studies are needed to establish efficacy, safety, functional and cognitive outcomes, and developmental effects.