Global research trends and thematic evolution of haptic feedback and force sensing in robot-assisted urologic surgery: a bibliometric and visualization study.

Robot-assisted urologic surgery attenuates the tactile and kinesthetic information normally generated by tissue contact, but the organization and scope of the related literature remain unclear. We mapped publication activity, collaboration, citation structure, and thematic change in research involving haptic feedback and force information. Web of Science Core Collection was searched on 24 July 2026 using a proximity-based robotic-urology block combined with terms for tactile or kinesthetic feedback, force sensing or estimation, force control, and sensory substitution. Seventy-four English-language articles and reviews published in 2001-2025 were analyzed with bibliometrix/Biblioshiny and CiteSpace. The corpus comprised 50 journals, 442 authors, 222 author keywords, and 2,335 cited references; 13 papers were published in 2025. The United States led output and network brokerage, and author participation was dispersed, with 89.59% contributing one record. Keyword and temporal analyses indicated increasing attention to procedure-specific force measurement, tactile or kinesthetic display, force-aware ureteroscopy, and model-based estimation. Relevance stratification identified 22 direct haptic/force studies and 52 contextual records; eight of the ten most cited papers were contextual, demonstrating that citation prominence partly reflected the wider robotic-urology and imaging literature. These findings describe the WoSCC-indexed research structure rather than clinical effectiveness. Future studies should use explicit terminology, standardized calibration and latency reporting, procedure-specific safety endpoints, and prospective multicenter validation.