Research on stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury: a bibliometric and visual analysis from 2018–2023

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the literature on stem cell treatment for spinal cord injury to gain an intuitive understanding of how the field is progressing, discover topics of interest, and determine what development trends are emerging in this field.Background: Spinal cord injury and its complications often cause an enormous economic burden, and postinjury repair and treatment have always been challenging in clinical and scientific research. Stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury can prevent immune rejection and induce the release of neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory factors to reduce the production of stress-related proteins, reactive oxygen species, and inflammatory reactions.Methods: We analyzed the number and quality of publications in the field of stem cell therapy in spinal cord injury between 2018.01.01 and 2023.06.30 in the core collection database of Web of Science. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to sort and summarize these studies by country, institution, authors' publications, and collaborative networks. In addition, the research topics of interest were identified and summarized.Results: This study ultimately included 2,150 valid papers, with the number of publications showing a gradual upward trend. The country, institution, author and journal with the greatest number of publications and citations are China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dai JW, and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, respectively. The top three high-frequency keyword clusters were hereditary paraplegia, reactive astrocytes and tissue engineering.Conclusion: With the help of visual analysis, we identified general trends and research topics of interest in the field of spinal cord injury over the last 5 years. Our findings suggest that stem cell transplantation for spinal cord injury and exosome therapy may be a focus of future research. This study provides a foundation for future research on stem cell therapy as well as clinical efforts in this field.

The top 100 most cited articles on mucopolysaccharidoses: a bibliometric analysis

“…Keywords are the condensed summary of an article, and if they frequently appear together, they are considered to be a research hotspot in this field (Liu et al, 2024;. The cooccurrence analysis of keywords in this study showed that bone marrow transplantation, enzyme replacement therapy, lysosomal storage disease, hurler syndrome, Children, alpha-l-iduronidase, hunter-syndrome, and central nervous system were the research hotspots in the field of MPS.…”

“…Frontiers in Genetics frontiersin.org visualizes the number of publications, but also reflects their connections and the evolution and development of the field as a whole, and it can help us to retrieve resources more efficiently (Liu et al, 2024). Among the top 100 most cited articles, 27 are MPS I (11 of them on MPS IH), 11 are MPS II, nine are MPS III (four on MPS IIIA), five are MPS IV (all on MPS IVA), eight are MPS VI, three are MPS VII, one is MPS IX, and the rest of the articles do not have a clear classification of the types of MPS were not categorized.…”

“…The number of citations of the same article in different databases is not the same, in order to avoid inconsistency in the results, so we choose only one database to search (Zhang et al, 2023). The Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) is the most extensively utilized database in academic research (L. Chen et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2024;Zhou et al, 2023), so we searched the WoSCC for articles related to MPS and sorted them in descending order of citations to filter the top 100 most-cited articles. The search was performed using the following terms: TI=(mucopolysaccharidosis) OR TI=(Mucopolysaccharidoses) OR TI=(Mucopolysaccharide Diseases) OR TI=(Mucopolysaccharides) OR TI=(MPS) OR TI=(Hurler syndrome) OR TI= (Hunter syndrome) OR TI=(Sanfilippo syndrome) OR TI=(Morquio syndrome) OR TI=(Marateaux-Lamy syndrome) OR TI=(Sly syndrome) OR TI=(Hyaluronidase deficiency), the language is set to English, the type of article is not limited, and the period from 1 January 1900 to 8 November 2023.…”