Zinc status in public health: exploring emerging research trends through bibliometric analysis of the historical context from 1978 to 2022

Abstract

The current study aims to provide a roadmap for future research by analyzing the research structures and trends in scholarly publications related to the status of zinc in public health. Only journal articles published between 1978 and 2022 are included in the refined bibliographical outputs retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The first section announces findings based on WoS categories, such as discipline heterogeneity, times cited and publications over time, and citation reports. The second section then employs VoSViewer software for bibliometric analysis, which includes a thorough examination of co-authorship among researchers, organizations, and countries and a count of all bibliographic databases among documents. The final section discusses the research's weaknesses and strengths in zinc status, public health, and potential future directions; 7158 authors contributed to 1730 papers (including 339 with publications, more than three times). "Keen, C.L." is a researcher with the most publications and a better understanding of zinc status in public health. Meanwhile, the USA has been the epicenter of research on the status of zinc in public health due to the highest percentage of publications with the most citations and collaboration with the rest of the world, with the top institution being the University of California, Davis. Future research can be organized collaboratively based on hot topics from co-occurrence network mapping and bibliographic couplings to improve zinc status and protect public health.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; Deficiency; Health; Malnutrition; Nutrition; Public health; Supplement; Zinc.

Fig. 1

Bibliometric analysis research design

Fig. 2

Pie chart from 1978 to 2022 showing the many languages used in publications about the status of zinc in public health

Fig. 3

The WOS categories used to create the treemap of the first 20 disciplines related to zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022. The number displayed in each box corresponds to the total number of publications for that discipline

Fig. 4

Zinc status in public health: trends, volume, and number of publications and citations from 1978 to 2022

Fig. 5

Network mapping of authors’ co-authorship that published articles on zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022

Fig. 6

Density visualization of co-authorship of the organizations that published articles related to zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022

Fig. 7

(a) Map showing the top ten countries in terms of productivity for articles on zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022. (b) A bar graph showing the overall number of citations from each country

Fig. 8

Network mapping of countries’ co-authorship published articles on zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022

Fig. 9

Network mapping of co-occurrence of the author’s keywords of the published articles related to zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022

Fig. 10

Network mapping of bibliographic couplings among the documents related to zinc status in public health from 1978 to 2022