ORIGINAL ARTICLE A Bibliometric Analysis of Pectoral Nerve Blocks Fulya Yilmaz 1 & Koray Bas 2 Received: 2 March 2019 /Accepted: 27 May 2019 # Association of Surgeons of India 2019 Abstract Pectoral nerve blocks (Pecs I and Pecs II) are superficial thoracic wall blocks which block the pectoral and intercostal nerves. They can be used as analgesia/anesthesia for breast surgery and other procedures/surgeries involving the anterior chest wall (arteriovenous graft creation surgery, minimally invasive cardiac surgery and thoracotomy, etc.). The aim of this study is to evaluate publications in the scientific field of pectoral nerve blocks. ISI Web of Knowledge-Science was used for the analysis. All scientific works published included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) from 1975 to January 27, 2019, were analyzed. A retrospective search was performed using key words Bpectoral nerve block,^ BPECS I,^ BPECS II,^ Bpecs block,^ BPECS block,^BPecs I,^ BPecs II,^ BPECS 1,^ BPECS 2,^ and Bmodified pecs I block.^ We further analyzed these results by the Banalyze^ function of the software in terms of number of papers for each country, type of documentation, number of publications per year, and name of journals and authors. The number of citations to published works was also calculated by using the citation function of the same software. 72 papers were found related to pectoral nerve block. The biggest contribution was from India (24.28%), and followed by Japan (14.28%), USA (14.28%), Canada (7.14%), Egypt (7.14%), Italy (5.71%), and South Korea (5.71%). The total number of publications increased sharply in years from 2014 (n = 1) to 2018 (n = 28). We have detected that papers on the use of pecs block in breast cancer surgery, which is one of the most common surgical procedure in the world, are few in the literature. With this study, we hope to increase the awareness on this area. We believe that pecs block applications will become widespread with the increasing use of ultrasound in anesthesia and the increase in education in this field. Keywords Pectoral nerve block . Bibliometric analysis . Regional anesthesia Introduction Bibliometric analysis analyzes the characteristics of publica- tions quantitatively and qualitatively [1, 2]. Bibliometry is a good choice for evaluating scientific activities over the time according to topic of researcher ’ s interest [2, 3]. The first bibliometric study was published by Garfield in the 1970s [1]. Then there has been an increase in bibliometric studies in the literature. PubMed, Scopus, Web of Knowledge- Science (WoS, Thomson Reuters Company), and Google Scholar are well-known databases for biblio- graphics analysis [3]. The WOS is also a software that can be used for analyzing scientific papers by various parameters indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) [1, 4]. Pectoral nerves blocks (Pecs I and Pecs II) are superficial thoracic wall blocks, which the pectoral and intercostal nerves. They can be used as analgesia/anesthesia for breast surgery and other procedures/surgery involving the anterior chest wall (arteriovenous graft creation surgery, minimally invasive cardiac surgery and thoracotomy, etc.) [5, 6] The aim of the current study is to analyze the scientific studies in the field of pectoral nerve block retrieved in the WoS database from 1975 to 2019. * Fulya Yilmaz fulya.dr@gmail.com 1 Department of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation, İzmir Bozyaka Training and Research Hospital, Health Science University, Saim Çıkrıkçı Caddesi No: 59, Karabağlar/İzmir, Turkey 2 Department of General Surgery, İzmir Bozyaka Training and Research Hospital, Health Science University, İzmir, Turkey Indian Journal of Surgery https://doi.org/10.1007/s12262-019-01905-4