Emerging trends and focus of human gastrointestinal microbiome research from 2010-2021: a visualized study

Abstract

Background: The gastrointestinal microbiome is an important component of the human body and is closely related to human health and disease. This study describes the hotspots of the human gastrointestinal microbiome research and its evolution in the past decade, evaluates the scientific cooperation network, and finally predicts the field's future development trend using bibliometric analysis and a visualized study.

Methods: We searched the original articles from January 2010 to February 2021 in the Scopus database using the term "gastrointestinal microbiome" and its synonyms. CiteSpace was used to construct country and author co-occurrence map; conduct journal, citation cocitation analysis, and reference co-citation knowledge map; and form a keywords co-occurrence map, a clustering knowledge map, timeline view of keywords, and burst term map.

Result: A total of 4444 documents published from January 2010 to February 2021 were analysed. In approximately the past decade, the number of articles on the human gastrointestinal microbiome has increased rapidly, and the research topics focus on different populations, research methods, and detection methods. All countries and regions in the world, led by the US, are studying the human gastrointestinal microbiome, and many research teams with close cooperation have been formed. The research has been published extensively in microbiology journals and clinical medicine journals, and the highly cited articles mainly describe the relationship between gastrointestinal microorganisms and human health and disease. Regarding the research emphasis, researchers' exploration of the human gastrointestinal microbiome (2011-2013) was at a relatively macro and superficial stage and sought to determine how the gastrointestinal microbiome relates to humans. From 2014 to 2017, increasingly more studies were conducted to determine the interaction between human gastrointestinal flora and various organs and systems. In addition, researchers (2018-2021) focused on the gastrointestinal microbial community and the diversity of certain types of microbes.

Conclusion: Over time, the scope of the research on the clinical uses of the gastrointestinal microbiome gradually increased, and the contents were gradually deepened and developed towards a more precise level. The study of the human gastrointestinal microbiome is an ongoing research hotspot and contributes to human health.

Keywords: Bibliometric; Emerging trends; Gastrointestinal microbiome; Human; Research focus; Scopus; Visualized study.

Fig. 1

Time-trend distribution of articles in the field of human gastrointestinal microbiome

Fig. 2

The country co-occurrence knowledge map of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. Nodes show in the form of annual rings that the annual ring width represents how many papers the country/region publishes in a given year. The more papers are published, the wider the annual ring is in that year [28]

Fig. 3

Annual distribution trends in the top five most published countries in the field of human gastrointestinal microbiome

Fig. 4

The author co-occurrence knowledge map of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. The connection between nodes represents the cooperation between authors, and the width of the connection represents the strength of cooperation. The color of the connection represents the author’s first cooperation time. After the network is generated, the author’s cooperation will form several natural clusters. The author cooperation within the cluster is close, and the author cooperation between each class is less [28]

Fig. 5

The co-citation knowledge map of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021

Fig. 6

The Keyword co-occurrence knowledge map of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. Each node represents a keyword, and the size of the node represents the frequency of their occurrence, and the line between nodes represents the intensity of co-occurrence, and the color of the line corresponds to the time range at the top of the picture. The frequency of keywords and centrality were listed is in the lower-left corner of the graph [28]

Fig. 7

The Keyword clustering knowledge map of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. CiteSpace uses Log-likelihood rate (LLR) to cluster closely related keywords. Different patterns represent a cluster. Tag # was assigned to the cluster, and the smaller the number is, the more keywords are in the cluster. The size of each cluster, the Silhouette value, and the mean publication year of articles in that cluster are shown in the upper right corner [28]

Fig. 8

The timeline view of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. In the timeline view, the keywords on the same horizontal line belong to the right cluster. The colors of lines and keywords in the view correspond to the colors of the time slice at the top [28]

Fig. 9

Top 20 Keywords with the Strongest Citation Bursts of the human gastrointestinal microbiome during 2010–2021. *1 The year in which this keyword first appeared. 2 the bursts’ strength of the keyword. 3 The year in which this keyword begins and ends the burst. 4 Red represents the period during which the keyword is burst