Antioxidants: Scientific Literature Landscape Analysis

Abstract

Antioxidants are abundant in natural dietary sources, and the consumption of antioxidants has a lot of potential health benefits. However, there has been no literature analysis on this topic to evaluate its scientific impact in terms of citations. This study is aimed at identifying and analysing the antioxidant publications in the existing scientific literature. In this context, a literature search was performed with the Web of Science database. Full records and cited references of the 299,602 identified manuscripts were imported into VOSviewer for bibliometric analysis. Most of the manuscripts were published since 1991. The publications were mainly related to the categories biochemistry/molecular biology, food science technology, and pharmacology/pharmacy. These topics have been prolific since 1990 and before. Polymer science was prolific before, but its publication share declined in the recent two decades. Brazil, China, India, and South Korea have emerged as upcoming major contributors besides USA. Most prolific journals were Food Chemistry, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Free Radical Biology and Medicine, and PLOS One. Clinical conditions with high citations included Alzheimer's disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Parkinson's disease. Chemical terms and structures with high citations included alpha-tocopherol, anthocyanin, ascorbate, beta-carotene, carotenoid, curcumin, cysteine, flavonoid, flavonol, hydrogen peroxide, kaempferol, N-acetylcysteine, nitric oxide, phenolic acid, uric acid, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, and resveratrol. Citation patterns temporal analysis revealed a transition of the scientific interest from research focused on antioxidant vitamins and minerals into stronger attention focus on antioxidant phytochemicals (plant secondary metabolites).

Figure 1

Cumulative annual publication count of antioxidant papers.

Figure 2

Term map for 1990 or before. The bubble map visualizes 155 terms (excluding the top 5000 common words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English) that appeared in at least 10 of the included publications published in 1990 or before. Bubble size indicates the frequency of occurrence of the words (multiple appearances in a single publication count as one). Bubble color indicates the averaged citation count received by publications containing the word in their titles or abstracts. Two bubbles are in closer proximity if the two words had more frequent cooccurrence.

Figure 3

Term map for 1991–2000. The bubble map visualizes 99 terms (excluding the top 5000 common words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English) that appeared in at least 500 of the included manuscripts published during 1991–2000. Bubble size indicates the frequency of occurrence of the words (multiple appearances in a single publication count as one). Bubble color indicates the averaged citation count received by publications containing the word in their titles or abstracts. Two bubbles are in closer proximity if the two words had more frequent cooccurrence.

Figure 4

Term map for 2001–2010. The bubble map visualizes 503 terms (excluding the top 5000 common words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English) that appeared in at least 500 of the included publications published during 2001–2010. Bubble size indicates the frequency of occurrence of the words (multiple appearances in a single publication count as one). Bubble color indicates the averaged citation count received by publications containing the word in their titles or abstracts. Two bubbles are in closer proximity if the two words had more frequent cooccurrence.

Figure 5

Term map for 2011–2018. The bubble map visualizes 1122 terms (excluding the top 5000 common words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English) that appeared in at least 500 of the included manuscripts published during 2011–2018. Bubble size indicates the frequency of occurrence of the words (multiple appearances in a single publication count as one). Bubble color indicates the averaged citation count received by publications containing the word in their titles or abstracts. Two bubbles are in closer proximity if the two words had more frequent cooccurrence.