Tracing the evolving dynamics and research hotspots of microbiota and immune microenvironment from the past to the new era

Abstract

Gut microbiota can regulate many physiological processes within gastrointestinal tract and other distal sites. Dysbiosis may not only influence chronic diseases like the inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), metabolic disease, tumor and its therapeutic efficacy, but also deteriorate acute injuries. This article aims to review the documents in this field and summarize the research hotspots as well as developing processes. Gut microbiota and immune microenvironment-related documents from 1976 to 2022 were obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Bibliometrics was used to assess the core authors and journals, most contributive countries and affiliations together with hotspots in this field and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Data were visualized to help comprehension. Nine hundred and twelve documents about gut microbiota and immune microenvironment were retrieved, and the annual publications increased gradually. The most productive author, country, and affiliation were "Zitvogel L," USA and "UNIV TEXAS MD ANDERSON CANC CTR," respectively. FRONTIERS IN IMMUNOLOGY, CANCERS, and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR SCIENCE were the periodicals with most publications. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified three clusters, including gut microbiota, inflammation, and IBD. Combined with the visualized analysis of documents and keyword co-occurrence as well as literature reading, we recognized three key topics of gut microbiota: cancer and therapy; immunity, inflammation and IBD; acute injuries and metabolic diseases. This article revealed researches on gut microbiota and immune microenvironment were growing. More attention should be given to the latest hotspots like gut microbiota, inflammation, IBD, cancer and immunotherapy, acute traumas, and metabolic diseases.IMPORTANCEGut microbiota can regulate many physiological processes within gastrointestinal tract and other distal sites. Dysbiosis may not only influence chronic diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), metabolic disease, tumor and its therapeutic efficacy, but also deteriorate acute injuries. While the application of bibliometrics in the field of gut microbiota and immune microenvironment still remains blank, which focused more on the regulation of the gut microbiota on the immune microenvironment of different kinds of diseases. Here, we intended to review and summarize the presented documents in gut microbiota and immune microenvironment field by bibliometrics. And we revealed researches on gut microbiota and immune microenvironment were growing. More attention should be given to the latest hotspots like gut microbiota, inflammation, IBD, cancer and immunotherapy, acute traumas, and metabolic diseases.

Keywords: acute injury; bibliometric analysis; cancer; gut microbiota; immune microenvironment; immunotherapy; inflammation; metabolic diseases.

Fig 1

The schematic flowchart of our study. We demonstrated the data source, process of researching, and bibliometric analysis in the picture.

Fig 2

Annual publications in gut microbiota and immune microenvironment field from 1976 to 2022. The publications before 2010 were sporadic and always less than 10, while after 2010, the yearly publications sustained rapid growth, reflecting the rapid development of the gut microbiota and immune microenvironment field in recent years.

Fig 3

(A) The top 20 most relevant authors who have published most of the articles in the gut microbiota and immune microenvironment field were listed accordingly. “Zitvogel L” and “Trinchieri G” were the top 2 authors, publishing 17 and 13 documents. respectively. (B) The top 20 authors’ local impact measured by h-index, which means that an author has published h articles and each of them has been cited for at least h times. It was noteworthy that “Zitvogel L” had the highest h-index of 14. (C) The top 20 most local cited authors, and local citation of a document meant that it was cited by any other document in our retrieval collection. The most local cited author was also “Zitvogel L” with 282 local citations, and other 19 authors were all locally cited for more than 200 times. (D) The top 20 authors’ production over time; the length of line means the author’s researching timeline; the size of the nodes reflects the number of publications; and the color density is proportional to total citations per year. It was worth pointing out that 18 of 20 authors were still active in the recent 2 y, again emphasizing that this was a newly emerging field.

Fig 4

(A) The top 20 productive countries which were measured by the number of documents written by corresponding author’s countries. SCP means that the investigation was finished by only one country, while MCP means that the researches were conducted by multiple countries. High MCP and high MCP ratio suggested that the researches of the country were more likely to cooperate with others, possibly implying that the development of this field would be more advanced. (B) Visualization of collaboration among countries by a network map; the line number means the cooperation times between countries, and the color density is proportional to the total publications. (C) The top 20 affiliations with the most publication outputs. American and Chinese affiliations are the two most prolific affiliations in the gut microbiota and immune microenvironment field. SCP, single country publication; MCP, multiple countries publication.

Fig 5

(A) The top 20 most relevant journals. (B) Journals’ order of arrangement corresponded to their publication outputs. All of the 20 most relevant journals were among the core sources, meaning that they were all pronounced in this area. (C) The top 20 most local cited journals, with Science and Nature dominated in this field.

Fig 6

(A) The top 20 most local cited documents. Documents meant the publications that we have downloaded from Web of Science core database with our retrieval text. (B) The top 20 most global cited documents. (C) The top 20 most local cited references. The references were the references of the documents we have previously retrieved, so that references with high local citations were more likely to have great influences inside this field. (D) Documents clusters. The four clusters were in red, blue, green, and purple.

Fig 7

(A) Word growth of keywords from 1991 to 2022, and the several most frequent keywords all began to be used increasingly around 2014. (B) Evolution of keywords on the basis of occurring frequency at four different periods. (C) Keyword co-occurrence map of 50 words, and the three clusters were in red, blue, and green. Red, blue, green clusters were dominated by “gut microbiota,” “inflammation,” and “inflammatory bowel disease” accordingly.

Fig 8

(A) The development of trend topics over time. (B) Thematic map; the X axis is centrality while Y axis is density; the map is divided into four quadrants which are motor themes, niche themes, emerging or declining themes, and basic and transversal themes, respectively.

Fig 9

Three major clusters in our discussion section. Red cluster concerning gut microbiota with cancer and therapy. Green cluster discussed the relationship between gut microbiota and immunity, inflammation plus IBD. Blue cluster talked about the topics of acute injuries and metabolic diseases.