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. 2023 Aug 9:13:1225859.
doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2023.1225859. eCollection 2023.

Gut microbiota and eye diseases: a bibliometric study and visualization analysis

Xiangyu Fu  1   2 , Haishan Tan  1   2 , Ling Huang  1   2 , Wenyue Chen  1   2 , Xiang Ren  1   2 , Danian Chen  1   2
Affiliations

Gut microbiota and eye diseases: a bibliometric study and visualization analysis

Xiangyu Fu et al. Front Cell Infect Microbiol. .

Abstract

Introduction: Recently the role of gut microbial dysbiosis in many ocular disorders, including but not limited to uveitis, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), dry eye, keratitis and orbitopathy is a hot research topic in the field. Targeting gut microbiota to treat these diseases has become an unstoppable trend. Bibliometric study and visualization analysis have become essential methods for literature analysis in the medical research field. We aim to depict this area's research hotspots and future directions by bibliometric software and methods.

Methods: We search all the related publications from the Web of Science Core Collection. Then, CiteSpace was applied to analyze and visualize the country distributions, dual-map overlay of journals, keyword bursts, and co-cited references. VOSviewer was employed to identify authors, co-cited authors, journals and co-cited journals and display the keyword co-occurrence networks.

Results: A total of 284 relevant publications were identified from 2009 to 2023. The number of studies has been small in the first five years and has grown steadily since 2016. These studies were completed by 1,376 authors from 41 countries worldwide, with the United States in the lead. Lin P has published the most papers while Horai R is the most co-cited author. The top journal and co-cited journal are both Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. In the keyword co-occurrence network, except gut microbiota, inflammation becomes the keyword with the highest frequency. Co-citation analyses reveal that gut dysbiosis is involved in common immune- and inflammation-mediated eye diseases, including uveitis, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, dry eye, and Graves' orbitopathy, and the study of microbiomes is no longer limited to the bacterial populations. Therapeutic strategies that target the gut microbiota, such as probiotics, healthy diet patterns, and fecal microbial transplantation, are effective and critical to future research.

Conclusions: In conclusion, the bibliometric analysis displays the research hotspots and developmental directions of the involvement of gut microbiota in the pathogenesis and treatment of some ocular diseases. It provides an overview of this field's dynamic evolution and structural relationships.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometric study; eye disease; fecal microbial transplantation; gut microbiota; inflammation; probiotics.

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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
The flow chart of the included publications and methods used in the bibliometric analysis. A total of 284 publications were included in the bibliometric analysis. CiteSpace was applied to analyze and visualize the country distributions, dual-map overlay of journals, keyword bursts, and co-cited references, and VOSviewer was employed to identify authors and co-cited authors, journals and co-cited journals, and to display the keyword co-occurrence networks.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of publications and citations from different years, countries and authors. (A) The citation report of the publication and citation trends from 2009 to 2022. (B) Country distributions of the publications. Countries with purple rings on the periphery have a high centrality. (C) VOSviewer visualization map of the co-cited authors. VOSviewer automatically classified co-authors with over 15 citations into three sections (the green, red, and blue sections respectively).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distribution of publications and citations from different journals. Visualization maps of the journals (A) and co-cited journals (B). Journals with the more publications or the higher co-citation frequency are symbolized as the larger nodes. The top journal and co-cited journal are both Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The dual-map overlay of journals. The dual-map overlay of journals displays the associations between publications and citations, with dots representing citing journals in the left and cited journals in the right, so that the citation relationships are depicted as colored lines from the left to the right.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The main keywords. (A) Keyword co-occurrence networks. The node size indicates the frequency of keyword occurrence, and the lines connecting nodes represent the strength of the link between keywords. Color mapping by the average year of keyword occurrence is employed to analyze the evolution of research trends. (B) The top keywords with the strongest citation bursts. The long blue line depicts the timeline (2009-2023), and the short red line indicates the burst period of certain keyword.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The main co-citation clusters. (A) CiteSpace visualization clusters of the co-cited references. Terms from the title field of the citing papers within each cluster are used as the definition of that cluster. (B) Timeline view of these listed clusters of the co-cited references.
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