Global Research Trends of Ferroptosis: A Rapidly Evolving Field With Enormous Potential

Abstract

Background: Ferroptosis is a newly proposed form of programmed cell death, and accumulating evidence suggests that it plays an essential role in the development of multiple diseases, especially cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. Since officially named in 2012, research on ferroptosis has grown rapidly. There are previous reviews focused on the research progress of ferroptosis from a certain aspect, but no bibliometric studies summarizing this field as a whole. This study aimed to assess the scientific output and activity regarding ferroptosis research from a global perspective.Methods: Publications related to ferroptosis from 2012 to 2020 were identified and selected from the Web of Science Core Collection. Excel 2019 and GraphPad Prism 8.0 was used to analyze quantitative variables including number of publications and citations, H-index, and journal citation reports. VOS viewer and CiteSpace were used to perform co-authorship, co-citation, and co-occurrence analysis of countries/institutes/authors/keywords.Results: A total of 1,285 publications on ferroptosis research were identified. The literature on ferroptosis had been continuously growing since 2012, and the expansion might continue at a rapid pace in the following years. China contributed the greatest proportion (43.74%) of ferroptosis publications, and the United States ranked first in the number of citation frequency (20,980 times) and H-index (70). B. R. Stockwell, D. L. Tang, and R. Kang were key researchers. The journal Cell Death Disease published the highest number of articles, with 42 articles. All the keywords could be divided into two clusters: cluster 1 (pathway and mechanism) and cluster 2 (treatment and effect). In terms of potential hotspots, keywords with the strong bursts and still ongoing recently were “neurodegeneration” (2017–2020), “chemotherapy” (2017–2020), “NF-kappa B” (2017–2020), and “photodynamic therapy” (2018–2020).Conclusion: There will be a dramatically increasing number of publications on ferroptosis research based on the current global trends. China has made significant progress in ferroptosis research, but the United States is actually dominated in this field. More focus will be placed on neurodegeneration, chemotherapy, nuclear factor κB, and photodynamic therapy, which may be the next popular topics in ferroptosis research.

Current State and Future Directions of Intranasal Delivery Route for Central Nervous System Disorders: A Scientometric and Visualization Analysis

“…In this study, CiteSpace was used to conduct research cooperation relationships of institutions, co-occurring network of subject categories, the dual-map overlay of journals, reference and keyword bursts. The indicator of betweenness centrality of a node can measure the importance of each node in the network, and the node with a higher centrality is commonly considered as a key point or pivotal turning point in the field (Wu et al, 2021a;Wu et al, 2021b). For additional detailed information about CiteSpace software, a manual is available at http://cluster.ischool.…”

“…The results above illustrate that developed countries especially the United States have taken a dominant position in the field of intranasal delivery research as they are investing substantial capital into developments in this technology. In general, adequate funding represents a necessary but not sufficient requirement for engaging and retaining new talent, research team to devote more work to a certain field (Wu et al, 2021b).…”

“…Some scholars have put forward that although the number of Chinese papers published in international journals has greatly increased, highquality research papers published in top grade journals are not very frequent (Qu et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2019). It is worth mentioning that this problem has gained the attention of policy-makers in China and academics are encouraged to improve research quality, rather than the quantity (Wu et al, 2021b).…”

“…The S2, we also create a dual-map overlay of the journals on intranasal administration research. In the dual-map overlays, the base map was built on the basis of 10,000 journals and the citing trajectories were generated after the input data (Chen and Leydesdroff, 2014b;Wu et al, 2021b). As described in previous study, the citing trajectories generated in the dual-map overlay module can describe the citation patterns and knowledge flows at the disciplinary level across almost the entire range of academic publications for a specific area (Wang et al, 2018).…”

“…However, due to limitation of scientometric software, direct merging of two databases is difficult. Consequently, previous studies usually chose one of the databases as the main searching database, and of these, WoSCC is the most commonly used reference database for scientometric studies (Merigó and Yang, 2017;Li et al, 2021;Wu et al, 2021a;Wu et al, 2021b). Second, as this is a rapidly developing area of research, the importance of the contribution of recently published studies might have been underestimated due to their low citation frequency, although some of the latest high-quality studies were published in top grade journals.…”