Trends in the Use of Lipases: A Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Scientific mapping using bibliometric data network analysis was applied to analyze research works related to lipases and their industrial applications, evaluating the current state of research, challenges, and opportunities in the use of these biocatalysts, based on the evaluation of a large number of publications on the topic, allowing a comprehensive systematic data analysis, which had not yet been conducted in relation to studies specifically covering lipases and their industrial applications. Thus, studies involving lipase enzymes published from 2018 to 2022 were accessed from the Web of Science database. The extracted records result in the analysis of terms of bibliographic compatibility among the articles, co-occurrence of keywords, and co-citation of journals using the VOSviewer algorithm in the construction of bibliometric maps. This systematic review analysis of 357 documents, including original and review articles, revealed studies inspired by lipase enzymes in the research period, showing that the development of research, together with different areas of knowledge, presents good results related to the applications of lipases, due to information synchronization. Furthermore, this review showed the main challenges in lipase applications regarding increased production and operational stability; establishing well-defined evaluation criteria, such as cultivation conditions, activity, biocatalyst stability, type of support and reactor; thermodynamic studies; reuse cycles; and it can assist in defining goals for the development of successful large-scale applications, showing several points for improvement of future studies on lipase enzymes.

Keywords: VOSviewer; bibliometric study; immobilization; industrial applications; lipase; scaling up.

Figure 1

PRISMA flow diagram information used from the database and records to create charts and tables. * Records deleted by the VOSviewer program.

Figure 2

Bibliographic coupling: overlay view for articles from the period 2018 to 2022. The items’ size indicates the number of citations of the articles [1,5,13,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41] Thus, the more citations an item had, the larger its label and circle.

Figure 3

Network visualization map of the co-occurrence of keywords based on the number of publications, considering the period from 2018 to 2022. The distance between terms shows the relationship’s strength (link strength), and the colors indicate a set of keywords with a high degree of simultaneous occurrence (cluster). The items that are more prominent are more frequent in database searches.

Figure 4

Density visualization map for co-citation of journals with at least ten citations. The most prominent areas show the journals that received the most citations.

Figure 5

Network visualization map for the co-occurrence of works that bring information about the scale-up process using lipases applied to bioprocesses [41,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114]. Publications in the period from 2018 to 2022 were considered. The distance between the terms shows the strength of the relationship (link strength), and the colors indicate a set of keywords with a high degree of simultaneous occurrence (cluster). More prominent items are more frequent in database searches.