The landscape of microbiota research in Iran; a bibliometric and network analysis

Abstract

Objectives: To introduce bibliometric features of Iranian documents on microbiota and to provide descriptive information about retrieved documents related to the medical sciences and documents utilizing molecular techniques for microbiota detection.

Methods: This is a descriptive bibliometric study of all Iranian documents on microbiota in any language that were indexed in Scopus before 7 September 2019. We assessed the research performance through statistical analysis of the bibliometric indicators, including number of publications, citations, institutions and journals activities, co-citations and bibliographic couplings, and network analysis of co-authorships, countries' collaborations, terms and keywords.

Results: We extracted 425 relevant documents, 260 of which pertain to the medical sciences. The most focused microbiota modulating interventions and diseases in 33 clinical trials are 'synbiotics' (n = 8) and 'probiotics' (n = 8), and 'Obesity' (n = 3) and 'non-alcoholic fatty liver disease' (n = 3), respectively. During the last decade, Iranian microbiota publications have increasingly grown with a constant upward slope, particularly in the area of medical sciences after 2016. Citation counting reveals that originals and reviews have been cited 4221 times, with an average 10.76 citations and H-index of 34. The most significant performance in publishing Iranian microbiota documents belongs to 'Tehran University of Medical Sciences' as the active institution (n = 89 publications) and the supporting sponsor (n = 19), 'Microbial Pathogenesis' as the productive journal (n = 12), 'Seidavi A' as the most authorships (n = 19), and 'the United States' as the collaborative country (n = 46).

Conclusions: The qualitative and quantitative information of this study will be a practical guidance for future study planning and policy-decision making.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; Iran; Microbiome; Microbiota; Scientometrics.

Fig. 1

The interconnection network between diseases and microbiota modulating interventions that are considered in clinical trials modulated microbiota in different disorders. In the first step, we picked out all original articles from 260 medical sciences-related documents, which constitute 121original articles, and categorized them into the following four groups: the human studies (69 articles; 57.02%), the in-vitro studies (36 articles; 29.75%), the animal studies (13 articles; 10.74%), and others (3 articles; 2.47%). In the next step, we distinguished the study design of all human studies and included all clinical trials dealing with microbiota modulating interventions in different disorders that finally, 33 clinical trials were carefully reviewed for data extraction

Fig. 2

The growth trend in the number of Iranian microbiota documents and their subsets, including medical science-related documents and non-medical science-related documents

Fig. 3

The authors’ performance clustering mapping and their co-authorships network in publishing Iranian microbiota articles. 63 authors of whom contributed to at least 3 Iranian microbiota articles constructs the largest co-authorship network and are divided into ten clusters displayed in different colors. Besides, there are a total of 150 collaborations between these 63 authors. The node size represents the number of articles published by each author and the thickness of the line between two authors represents the number of their co-authorships

Fig. 4

The density geographical map that visualizes the volume of international collaborations of countries in publishing Iranian microbiota articles

Fig. 5

The co-occurrence clustering network mapping of the most repetitive terms with at least 30 repetitions that are retrieved from the title and abstract of Iranian microbiota articles; 83 terms meet this threshold that are subdivided into three clusters depicted with red, green and blue. The node size represents the number of repetitions of each term

Fig. 6

The rainbow density mapping of co-citation analysis of the journals publishing at least 5 Iranian microbiota articles. The journal co-citation analysis calculates the frequency of two journals’ articles that are co-cited by other articles. The higher co-citation of journal (from blue to red color) indicates that journal has higher semantic relationship with the field of research e.g. ‘Plos one’ and ‘nature’ are the prominent journals in this field