Letter to The Rise of Intelligent Plastic Surgery: A 10-Year Bibliometric Journey Through AI Applications, Challenges, and Transformative Potential.

This correspondence appraises "The Rise of Intelligent Plastic Surgery: A 10-Year Bibliometric Journey Through AI Applications, Challenges, and Transformative Potential." First, apparent "explosive" growth may reflect hype cycles, duplication, and editorial dynamics; impact should be triangulated with field-weighted citation impact, citation half-life, and distributions of study designs, including rates of external validation. Second, topic clusters derived from VOSviewer/CiteSpace risk conflating lexical proximity with practical centrality; calibration with expert Delphi panels and structured content analyses is needed to verify whether detected "hotspots"-shaped surgical decision making. Third, despite enthusiasm for workflow integration, many surgical AI models remain proof of concept without prospective, real-world evaluation, external validation, or post-deployment surveillance, raising concerns about generalizability and bias. Overall, the reviewed article offers a valuable quantitative foundation. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE IV: This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266.