A 2-decade bibliometric analysis of epigenetics of cardiovascular disease: from past to present

Abstract

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a major health killer worldwide, and the role of epigenetic regulation in CVD has been widely studied in recent decades. Herein, we perform a bibliometric study to decipher how research topics in this field have evolved during the past 2 decades.

Results: Publications on epigenetics in CVD produced during the period 2000-2022 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). We utilized Bibliometrix to build a science map of the publications and applied VOSviewer and CiteSpace to assess co-authorship, co-citation, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling. In total, 27,762 publications were included for bibliometric analysis. The yearly amount of publications experienced exponential growth. The top 3 most influential countries were China, the United States, and Germany, while the most cited institutions were Nanjing Medical University, Harbin Medical University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Four major research trends were identified: (a) epigenetic mechanisms of CVD; (b) epigenetics-based therapies for CVD; (c) epigenetic profiles of specific CVDs; and (d) epigenetic biomarkers for CVD diagnosis/prediction. The latest and most important research topics, including "nlrp3 inflammasome", "myocardial injury", and "reperfusion injury", were determined by detecting citation bursts of co-occurring keywords. The most cited reference was a review of the current knowledge about how miRNAs recognize target genes and modulate their expression and function.

Conclusions: The number and impact of global publications on epigenetics in CVD have expanded rapidly over time. Our findings may provide insights into the epigenetic basis of CVD pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment.

Keywords: Bibliometric; Bibliometric study; Cardiovascular disease; CiteSpace; Epigenetics; VOSviewer; Visualization.

Fig. 1

Co-citation network of references (2000–2022) with corresponding clusters obtained with CiteSpace. A Co-citation reference network with cluster visualization and citation bursts of hotspots. B Visualization map of the corresponding clusters and citation bursts of hotspots. Note: Each node represents a co-cited reference, with the size of the node being proportional to the number of times the reference has been co-cited. The tree rings surrounding the nodes refer to citation bursts of co-cited references

Fig. 2

Timeline visualization of networks of co-occurring keywords for the period 2000–2022 (A) and 2017–2022 (B). Note: Each node is representative of a co-occurring keyword, with the color of the node depending on the average publication year of all articles containing this keyword. A brighter node refers to a keyword that emerged more recently. The tree rings surrounding the nodes represent citation bursts of co-occurring keywords. The networks are weighted on total link strength across different nodes and scored on the average publication years. The identified cluster labels are marked in red, and placed on the right side of the networks

Fig. 3

Co-citation network of co-authors’ countries (2000–2022) (A) and co-citation network of co-authors’ institutions (2017–2022) (B) with corresponding clusters (C)

Fig. 4

Co-authorship network (A) with corresponding clusters (B) for the period 2000–2022

Fig. 5

Bibliographic coupling networks of countries (A), institutions (B), journals (C), references (D), and authors (E) (weighted on the total link strength). Note: The minimum number of documents in a country should exceed 583; the Minimum number of citations of a document should exceed 240,490; the Minimum number of documents of a journal should exceed 10,519; Minimum number of documents of an author should exceed 30,579; Minimum number of documents of an institution should exceed 25,507