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Review
. 2021 Apr 29:9:646311.
doi: 10.3389/fcell.2021.646311. eCollection 2021.

Global Research Trends of Ferroptosis: A Rapidly Evolving Field With Enormous Potential

Haiyang Wu  1 , Yulin Wang  1 , Linjian Tong  1 , Hua Yan  1   2 , Zhiming Sun  1   3
Affiliations
Review

Global Research Trends of Ferroptosis: A Rapidly Evolving Field With Enormous Potential

Haiyang Wu et al. Front Cell Dev Biol. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Background: Ferroptosis is a newly proposed form of programmed cell death, and accumulating evidence suggests that it plays an essential role in the development of multiple diseases, especially cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. Since officially named in 2012, research on ferroptosis has grown rapidly. There are previous reviews focused on the research progress of ferroptosis from a certain aspect, but no bibliometric studies summarizing this field as a whole. This study aimed to assess the scientific output and activity regarding ferroptosis research from a global perspective. Methods: Publications related to ferroptosis from 2012 to 2020 were identified and selected from the Web of Science Core Collection. Excel 2019 and GraphPad Prism 8.0 was used to analyze quantitative variables including number of publications and citations, H-index, and journal citation reports. VOS viewer and CiteSpace were used to perform co-authorship, co-citation, and co-occurrence analysis of countries/institutes/authors/keywords. Results: A total of 1,285 publications on ferroptosis research were identified. The literature on ferroptosis had been continuously growing since 2012, and the expansion might continue at a rapid pace in the following years. China contributed the greatest proportion (43.74%) of ferroptosis publications, and the United States ranked first in the number of citation frequency (20,980 times) and H-index (70). B. R. Stockwell, D. L. Tang, and R. Kang were key researchers. The journal Cell Death Disease published the highest number of articles, with 42 articles. All the keywords could be divided into two clusters: cluster 1 (pathway and mechanism) and cluster 2 (treatment and effect). In terms of potential hotspots, keywords with the strong bursts and still ongoing recently were "neurodegeneration" (2017-2020), "chemotherapy" (2017-2020), "NF-kappa B" (2017-2020), and "photodynamic therapy" (2018-2020). Conclusion: There will be a dramatically increasing number of publications on ferroptosis research based on the current global trends. China has made significant progress in ferroptosis research, but the United States is actually dominated in this field. More focus will be placed on neurodegeneration, chemotherapy, nuclear factor κB, and photodynamic therapy, which may be the next popular topics in ferroptosis research.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOS viewer; WoSCC; bibliometric analysis; ferroptosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Flowchart for the selection of publications included in this study.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The number of articles published annually and the summed total citations of annual articles related to ferroptosis have been steadily increasing from 2012 to 2020.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
(A) Geographical distribution map of global publications related to ferroptosis. (B) The changing trend of the annual publication counts in the top 10 countries/regions from 2012 to 2020.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
(A) The cross-country/region collaborations visualization map. (B) The countries/regions citation network visualization map generated by VOS viewer software.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
The institutions’ collaboration (A) and citation (B) network visualization map generated by VOS viewer software.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
The authors’ collaboration (A) and co-citation (B) network visualization map generated by VOS viewer software.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
A dual-map overlay of the journals on ferroptosis research generated by using CiteSpace software.
FIGURE 8
FIGURE 8
The top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts during 2012 to 2020.
FIGURE 9
FIGURE 9
The network visualization map of keywords by VOS viewer. (A) Map of keywords clustering showed 37 keywords with a minimum of 100 occurrences and divided into two clusters. (B) Different colors were applied for each keyword based on their average appearance time in the overlay visualization map. Blue color represented the keywords that appeared relatively earlier than those in yellow and red upon time course.
FIGURE 10
FIGURE 10
The top 25 keywords with the strongest citation bursts of publications on ferroptosis research.
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