Scientometric analysis of mammalian microbiome research

Abstract

Over the past few decades, microbiota research has been gaining the attention of the researchers working on the concepts of health–enhancement and overall–wellbeing. The mammalian microbiome has been progressively acknowledged as a developing research area resulting in an increased number of publications. This study intends to use scientometric and bibliometric analysis to evaluate the research development and evolution of publication patterns in the field of mammalian microbiome between 2007 and 2020. 512 published articles were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and were analyzed. We assessed the quantity and quality of research output through statistical methods of bibliometric indicators, comprising a number of publications, citations, productive authors, journals and countries, using a bibliometric analysis. Scientometric analysis was performed using main path analysis, bibliometric coupling, co-word co-occurrence and co-author analysis, systematically characterizing and visualizing the trend and delivering a pivotal review of the mammalian microbiome research status quo. The results identified an increase in the number of publications over time showing the rapid research growth, with top productive countries recording the highest number of research outcomes with influential research. The bibliographic coupling revealed the most shared papers that form landmark papers and the co-author analysis indicated the most influential authors in mammalian microbiome research. The evolutionary path of the mammalian microbiome research was traced using the main path analysis identifying the milestone papers. The frequently occurred words were enumerated from co-word, co-occurrence networks. The information from this study could be a transcript for a comprehensive understanding of current mammalian microbiome research and can also direct the future and emerging trends in this research realm.