Bibliometric analysis of research on the role of intestinal microbiota in obesity

Abstract

BackgroundObesity is a key public health problem. The advancement of gut microbiota research sheds new light on this field. This article aims to present the research trends in global intestinal microbiota studies within the domain of obesity research.MethodsBibliographic information of the publications on intestinal microbiota and obesity was retrieved from the Scopus database, and then analyzed by using bibliometric approaches.ResultsA total of 3,446 references were retrieved; the data indicated a steady growth and an exponential increase in publication numbers. The references were written in 23 different languages (93.8% in English). A number of 3,056 English journal papers were included in the further analyses. Among the 940 journals, the most prolific ones were PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports, and British Journal of Nutrition. North America and Europe were the highest publication output areas. The US (995 publications) ranked first in the number of publications, followed by the China (243 publications) and France (242 publications). The publication numbers were significantly correlated with gross domestic product (GDP), human development index (HDI), and population number (PN). International collaboration analysis also shows that most of the collaborations are among developed countries.DiscussionThis comprehensive bibliometric study indicates that gut microbiota is a significant topic in the obesity research. The structured information may be helpful in understanding research trends, and locating research hot spots and gaps in this domain.

Global research trends in microbiome-gut-brain axis during 2009–2018: a bibliometric and visualized study

“…Since 2012, there has been growing research output in the field of MGBA, which is consistent with increasing research activity related to the microbiome in general. Similar findings have been reported in other bibliometric studies [43,44,[86][87][88][89]. A possible underlying explanation for the rising publication numbers is that in 2013 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the second phase of Integrative Human Microbiome Project (iHMP) [90].…”

“…Although a large number of databases are used for evaluation research at global level [45][46][47], the current study uses the Scopus database which is widely accepted among researchers for the purposes of high quality bibliometric analyses [44,[48][49][50][51][52][53]. Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature, and is an established resource for identifying biomedical research including MEDLINE documents, and includes a higher level of detail than PubMed including the country of origin and citations per document [47,54].…”

“…Bibliometric analyses have been used in various fields to highlight the most influential countries, authors, journals, publications, and institutions [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. These include research related to microbiota [43,44]. Worldwide, there are more than 330 clinical studies recorded on clinical trials.gov with a specific focus on the microbiome.…”

“…Of the 86 countries, 35 had at least ten publications; the largest set of connected countries consists of 34 countries. The size of frame represents the number of publications of the country and the thickness of lines signifies the size of collaboration between the countries, while 6 different colors seen in this figure represent the collaboration cluster of the countriesResearch output related to MGBA most often originated from the United States, as reported in other bibliometric studies regarding microbiome research[43,44,[86][87][88][89].…”

Linking the dimensions of policy-related research on obesity: a hybrid mapping with multicluster topics and interdisciplinarity maps

“…Similar studies dealt with specific geographic regions, such as the Arab countries (Sweileh et al 2014). These aspects were complemented with a more detailed analysis on co-author networks, journal citation networks and simple thematic maps, based on co-occurrences of frequent terms in Yao et al (2018), also a study on a specific clinical aspect (the role of intestinal microbiota in obesity). The topical organization of (NHLBI-) funded projects and the productivity and impact of individual topics was the key issue for Nicastro et al (2016).…”