Global Trends on Blastocystis sp. Research: A Scientometric Study

Abstract

Blastocystis sp. is the most common unicellular, luminal parasite in humans and animals. It has been associated with diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome. This article describes the bibliometric research of articles published in Web of Science (WoS) database on Blastocystis sp. over a 51-year period. The VOSviewer visualization methodology was used for this study. Institutions, nations, international collaborations, journals, articles, authors, keywords, co-authors, co-citations, and citation rates from the WoS database formed the data of this study. A total of 1066 documents were found in the WoS database. Of which 773 were articles and only those publications were analyzed. The articles were cited 22,034 times in total and the mean Hirsch (H) index was 74. The countries with the highest number of articles were as follows: USA (n = 86; 11.125%), Singapore (n = 71; 9.185%), and Malaysia (n = 70; 9.056). Since 2000, there have been a limited number of articles and since 2014 there has been a minimum of 34 publications per year. The highest number of articles was published in 2021 (n = 76) and the highest number of citations (n = 3408) was in 2021. The leading affiliation according to the number of published articles was the National University of Singapore (9.185%), University Malaya (7.245%), and Nara Women’s University (5.304%). The USA, Singapore, and Malaysia have led scientific production on Blastocystis sp. Efforts should be made to help them develop interdisciplinary scientific research networks with these countries on Blastocystis sp.