Evolutionary Trend Analysis of Research on 5-ALA Delivery and Theranostic Applications Based on a Scientometrics Study

Abstract

5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) has been extensively studied for its sustainability and broad-spectrum applications in medical research and theranostics, as well as other areas. It’s a precursor of protoporphyrin IX (PpIX), a sustainable endogenous and naturally-existing photosensitizer. However, to the best of our knowledge, a scientometrics study based on the scientific knowledge assay of the overall situation on 5-ALA research has not been reported so far, which would be of major importance to the relevant researchers. In this study, we collected all the research articles published in the last two decades from the Web of Science Core Collection database and employed bibliometric methods to comprehensively analyze the dataset from different perspectives using CiteSpace. A total of 1595 articles were identified. The analysis results showed that China published the largest number of articles, and SBI Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. was the most productive institution that sponsored several of the most productive authors. The cluster analysis and burst detections indicated that the improvement of photodynamic efficacy theranostics is the up-to-date key direction in 5-ALA research. Furthermore, we emphatically studied nanotechnology involvement in 5-ALA delivery and theranostics research. We envision that our results will be beneficial for researchers to have a panorama of and deep insights into this area, thus inspiring further exploitations, especially of the nanomaterial-based systems for 5-ALA delivery and theranostic applications.

Molecular imaging research in atherosclerosis: A 23-year scientometric and visual analysis

“…Scientometrics is an application-oriented discipline that describes the process of scientific development, reveals the internal mechanism of scientific evolution, and predicts the trend of scientific development. It takes quantitative analysis as the main way to reflect the scientific activities of a certain domain ( Lackner et al, 2021 ; Zhou et al, 2022 ). Meanwhile, there have been several kinds of software developed to help scholars manage data mining and knowledge mapping such as CiteSpace ( Fan et al, 2020 ), VOSviewer ( van Eck and Waltman, 2010 ), HistCite ( Li et al, 2022a ), and so on.…”