Global Characteristics and Trends in Research on Ferroptosis: A Data-Driven Bibliometric Study

Abstract

Ferroptosis, an iron-dependent form of regulated cell death, has drawn an increasing amount of attention since it was first mentioned in 2012 and is found to play a significant role in the treatment of certain diseases. Our study is aimed at analysing the scientific output of ferroptosis research and at driving future research into novel publications. Publications focused on ferroptosis were retrieved from the SCI-EXPANDED database of the Web of Science Core Collection and were screened according to inclusion criteria. CiteSpace V and Microsoft Excel 2016 were used to evaluate and visualize the results, including generating network maps and analysing annual publications, country, category, references and cocited references, and keywords. As of October 1, 2021, a total of 1690 original articles related to ferroptosis were included, and the overall trend of the number of publications rapidly increased. Among the common categories in the field of ferroptosis, the most common category was biochemistry and molecular biology. Worldwide, China and the United States were the leading countries for research production. The retrieved 1690 publications received 44,650 citations, with an average of 26.42 citations per paper (October 1, 2021). By citation analysis, Scott J Dixon’s article in 2012 was the most symbolic reference and the earliest publication in the field of ferroptosis, with the highest citation rate (2709 times). Among the most common keywords, most were related to the mechanisms and regulatory networks of ferroptosis. Furthermore, with accumulating evidence demonstrating the role of ferroptosis in cancers and other diseases, inducing ferroptosis in clinical treatment is becoming a new research focus that should be closely monitored.

Bibliometric and visualization analysis of macrophages associated with osteoarthritis from 1991 to 2021

“…Recently, bibliometric analysis has been widely adopted to analyze massive scientific research data and identify developing trends (15). Importantly, it can summarize publication evolution, predict research hotspots, and further evaluate frontiers in specific fields though a citation network (16)(17)(18). As far as we know, although related academic researchers have published bibliometric studies of stem cells in OA (19), no similar analysis about macrophage in OA have as yet been reported.…”

Bibliometric and visual analysis of neutrophil extracellular traps from 2004 to 2022

“…This method focuses on countries, institutions, journals, authors, and keywords related to research in a specific field, providing readers with an objective view of trends and frontiers in the field (23,24). Bibliometric analysis has been used in many research areas, including innate immunity (25), pyroptosis (26), ferroptosis (27), and other areas closely related to NETs. Despite the rapid development of NETsrelated research in the last two decades, there is still a lack of bibliometric analyses related to the field of NETs.…”

The research landscape of ferroptosis in the brain: A bibliometric analysis

“…Table 3 shows the top 10 active authors in the field of ferroptosis in the brain ranked by publication frequency. Ashley I. Bush from the University of Melbourne contributed 20 articles in this field and Marcus Conrad ( Chen et al, 2021 ), Scott Ayton ( Li et al, 2022 ), and Pamela Maher ( Dong et al, 2022 ) ranked after him ( Table 3 ).…”

“…Although the great potential and a keen interest of ferroptosis has been raised by scholars and confirmed by several bibliometric studies, these studies focused on ferroptosis without classification of the research area ( Wu et al, 2021 ; Xiong et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ; Dong et al, 2022 ) or the field of cancer ( Zhou et al, 2021 ; Li et al, 2022 ) and stroke ( Chen et al, 2021 ) research. The research landscape of ferroptosis that has concentrated on the field of brain science is not fully understood.…”