The landscape of microbiota research in Iran; a bibliometric and network analysis

Abstract

Objectives To introduce bibliometric features of Iranian documents on microbiota and to provide descriptive information about retrieved documents related to the medical sciences and documents utilizing molecular techniques for microbiota detection. Methods This is a descriptive bibliometric study of all Iranian documents on microbiota in any language that were indexed in Scopus before 7 September 2019. We assessed the research performance through statistical analysis of the bibliometric indicators, including number of publications, citations, institutions and journals activities, co-citations and bibliographic couplings, and network analysis of co-authorships, countries' collaborations, terms and keywords. Results We extracted 425 relevant documents, 260 of which pertain to the medical sciences. The most focused microbiota modulating interventions and diseases in 33 clinical trials are 'synbiotics' (n = 8) and 'probiotics' (n = 8), and 'Obesity' (n = 3) and 'non-alcoholic fatty liver disease' (n = 3), respectively. During the last decade, Iranian microbiota publications have increasingly grown with a constant upward slope, particularly in the area of medical sciences after 2016. Citation counting reveals that originals and reviews have been cited 4221 times, with an average 10.76 citations and H-index of 34. The most significant performance in publishing Iranian microbiota documents belongs to 'Tehran University of Medical Sciences' as the active institution (n = 89 publications) and the supporting sponsor (n = 19), 'Microbial Pathogenesis' as the productive journal (n = 12), 'Seidavi A' as the most authorships (n = 19), and 'the United States' as the collaborative country (n = 46). Conclusions The qualitative and quantitative information of this study will be a practical guidance for future study planning and policy-decision making.

Microbiota research in Iran; current knowledge and future perspective

“…Microbiome research has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Research in this field has dramatically increased in Iran like all over the world [5]. Our bibliometric study provided a practical outlook of Iranian microbiota research and highlighted the research foci and gaps in the microbiome field as guiding information for other researchers interested in the microbiome research.…”

“…1). The trend of medical sciences' papers has grown steeper noticeably after 2016 that should be noted that EMRI and Pasteur Institute contributed significantly in these researches [5].…”

Visualization of knowledge flow in interpersonal scientific collaboration network endocrinology and metabolism research institute

“…The Collaboration Index of 3.3 shows the average number of the contribution of authors per article, that is lower than the average number of authors in the PubMed database [1]. Less than 1 % of papers have been written by a single author who represents the interdisciplinary nature of the research areas of the EMRI [31]. These results are also supported by the Collaboration coefficient (CC).…”

Topic Analysis and Mapping of Tuberculosis Research Using Text Mining and Co-Word Analysis

“…The statistical population was all original articles on tuberculosis in the Scopus citation database. Due to its comprehensiveness for different fields of science and indexing of numerous articles, this database is appropriate for scientometric studies [18][19][20]. In order to determine the main keywords for searching in the Scopus database, the Medical Subject Headings (MESH) was used after consultation with experts in the field of microbiology.…”