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. 2024 Jan 26;103(4):e36575.
doi: 10.1097/MD.0000000000036575.

Bibliometric and visual analysis of intestinal flora and immunity

Kaidi Nie  1   2   3 , Tingting Deng  1   2   3 , Jie Wang  1   2   3 , Luming Qi  1   2   3 , Nannan Liu  1   2   3 , Zhixuan Chen  1   2   3 , Lina Xia  1   2   3
Affiliations

Bibliometric and visual analysis of intestinal flora and immunity

Kaidi Nie et al. Medicine (Baltimore). .

Abstract

Background: The gut microbiota and its stability have important relationships with immunity. However, bibliometric analysis in this field is underdeveloped. This study aims to visualize publications related to the gut microbiota and immunity to identify research frontiers and hotspots, providing references and guidance for further research.

Methods: Gut microbiota and immunity data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database, and Microsoft Excel, Scimago Graphica and VOSviewer software were used to analyze publication output trends, the most productive countries/regions, journals, authors, co-cited references, and keywords.

Results: This study analyzed 16,611 publications, including 10,865 articles and 5746 reviews, and found a continuous increase in publications related to gut microbiota and immunity since 2013. We identified 62,872 authors contributing to this field from 2144 journals and 9965 organizations/institutions in 145 countries/regions. The top publisher with the highest output is University of California System with 525 papers. Among these journals, the top 3 most prolific journals are Frontiers in Immunology, Frontiers in Microbiology, and PLOS ONE. The literature with the highest citation frequency is published in Science and has been cited 3006 times by Patrick M. Smith and others.Gut microbiota research hotspots include gut microbiota inflammation, immune response, inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), and microbiota tumors. The gut microbiota and its microbial homeostasis play critical roles in immune reactions, inflammation, and even tumors and IBDs.Current research on gut microbiota and immunity is a popular field. Previous studies have shown that the gut microbiota and its microbial species have important effects on maintaining human health, immune function, inflammation, tumorigenesis, and IBDs. Understanding the roles of microbial communities and specific bacterial species as well as their interactions with humans has led to numerous discoveries that provide unique opportunities for exploring human health and future research.

Conclusion: This study used bibliometric and visualization analysis to identify the development trends and hotspots of publications related to the gut microbiota and immunity. The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the emerging trends and future directions in this field.

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Conflict of interest statement

This article received funding from the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 2023NSFSC1810). A total of 100,000 yuan was awarded, which was used for the research conducted. We declare that there were no conflicts of interest during the research process. The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Flowchart of data filtration processing and excluding publications.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Annual publications quantitative distribution from 2013–2022.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
(A) The co-authorship map of authors. (B) Number of publications issued by authors.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
The co-authorship map of organizations. University of California System has published the most related papers (525 items).
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Ranking of published articles by countries.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Visualization knowledge maps of citation. The size of the nodes represents the counts of citations. The distance between the 2 nodes indicates their correlation.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Visualization of keyword co-occurrence analysis. The size of nodes indicates the frequency of occurrences of the keywords. The lines between the nodes represents their co-occurrence in the same publication. The shorter the distance between 2 nodes, the larger the number of co-occurrence of the 2 keywords.
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