Bibliometric Insights of Global Research Landscape in Mitophagy

Guoli Li; Wei Yin; Yiya Yang; Hongyu Yang; Yinyin Chen; Yumei Liang; Weiru Zhang; Tingting Xie

doi:10.3389/fmolb.2022.851966

Bibliometric Insights of Global Research Landscape in Mitophagy

Front Mol Biosci. 2022 Jul 18:9:851966. doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2022.851966. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Guoli Li^{1

2

3}, Wei Yin^{1

2

3}, Yiya Yang^{1

2

3}, Hongyu Yang⁴, Yinyin Chen^{1

2

3}, Yumei Liang^{1

2

3}, Weiru Zhang^{5

6

7}, Tingting Xie^{5

6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nephrology, Hunan Provincial People's Hospital, The First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
² Changsha Clinical Research Center for Kidney Disease, Changsha, China.
³ Hunan Clinical Research Center for Chronic Kidney Disease, Changsha, China.
⁴ Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.
⁵ Department of General Medicine, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.
⁶ International Collaborative Research Center for Medical Metabolomics, Xiangya Hospital Central South University, Changsha, China.
⁷ National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders (Xiangya Hospital), Changsha, China.

Abstract

Background: Autophagy is a highly regulated and evolutionarily conserved process in eukaryotes which is responsible for protein and organelle degradation. Although this process was described over 60 years ago, the selective autophagy of mitochondria (mitophagy) was recently coined in 2005. Research on the topic of mitophagy has made rapid progress in the past decade, which proposed to play critical roles in human health and disease. This study aimed to visualize the scientific outputs and research trends of mitophagy. Methods: Articles and reviews related to the topic of mitophagy were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection on 30 November 2021. Two kinds of software (CiteSpace and VOSviewer) were used to perform a visualized analysis of countries/regions, institutions, authors, journals, references, and keywords. Results: From 2005 to 2021, total 5844 publications on mitophagy were identified for final analysis. The annual number of publications grew yearly over the past 17 years. United States (N = 2025) and Chinese Academy of Sciences is the leading country and institute (N = 112) ranked by the number of publications, respectively. The most productive author was Jun Ren (N = 38) and Derek P. Narendra obtained the most co-cited times (2693 times). The journals with the highest output and the highest co-citation frequency were Autophagy (N = 208) and Journal of Biological Chemistry (co-citation: 17226), respectively. Analyses of references and keywords suggested that "mechanism of mitochondrial quality control", "molecule and signaling pathway in mitophagy", and "mitophagy related diseases" were research hotspots, and parkin-mediated mitophagy and its roles in skeletal muscle and inflammation-related diseases may be the frontiers of future research. Conclusion: Although mitophagy research has flourished and attracted attention from all over the world, the regional imbalance in the development of mitophagy research was observed. Our results provided a comprehensive global research landscape of mitophagy from 2005- 2021 from a perspective of bibliometrics, which may serve as a reference for future mitophagy studies.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometric analysis; mitophagy; visualization.