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. 2023 Aug 15:16:2817-2834.
doi: 10.2147/JPR.S413028. eCollection 2023.

Global Trends and Hotspots on Microglia Associated with Pain from 2002 to 2022: A Bibliometric Analysis

Guoqi Dong  1 , Hui Li  1 , Hui Gao  1 , Yingqi Chen  1 , Huayuan Yang  1
Affiliations

Global Trends and Hotspots on Microglia Associated with Pain from 2002 to 2022: A Bibliometric Analysis

Guoqi Dong et al. J Pain Res. .

Abstract

Background: Researchers have made significant progress in microglia associated with pain in recent years. However, more relevant bibliometric analyses are still needed on trends and directions in this field. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive perspective and to predict future directions of pain-related microglia research via bibliometric tools.

Methods: English articles and reviews related with pain and microglia were extracted from the Web of Science core collection (WosCC) database between 2002 to 2022. Bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and Bibliometrix R package were used to analyze publication characteristics, countries, authors, institutions, journals, research hotspots, and trend topics.

Results: A total of 2761 articles were included in this analysis. Research on microglia associated with pain has increased significantly over the last two decades. China (n = 1020, 36.94%) and the United States (n = 751, 27.20%) contributed the most in terms of publications and citations, respectively. Kyushu University published the most articles in this field compared to other institutions, and Professor Inoue Kazuhide (n = 54) at this university made outstanding contributions in this field. Molecular Pain (n = 113) was the journal with the most publication, while Journal of Neuroscience had the highest number of citations. According to the authors keywords analysis, the research in this area can be summarized into 7 clusters such as "microglia activation pathways", "pain treatment research", "mental symptoms of chronic pain", and so on.

Conclusion: This study provides a comprehensive analysis of pain-related microglia research in the past two decades. We identified the countries, institutions, scholars, and journals with the highest number of publications and the most influence in the field, and the research trends identified in this paper may provide new insights for future research.

Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometrics; microglia; pain.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of data retrieval and analysis in this study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The trend of annual publications and citations over the past 20 years.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The annual trends in 5 prolific countries.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Collaboration visualization between countries. (A) The international collaboration of countries. (B) The co-authorship map of countries.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Collaborations network of institutions on microglia associated with pain.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Authors contributing to the research on microglia associated with pain. (A) Author collaboration network. (B) Bibliometric coupling of co-cited authors based on VOSviewer.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Co-cited reference related to the research on microglia in pain. (A) Clustering network diagram of co-cited references generated by CiteSpace. (B) Timeline diagram of the 17 specific reference clusters (2002–2022).
Figure 8
Figure 8
Top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts based on CiteSpace. The bold column indicates the year when the references began to be cited frequently.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Network visualization map of author keywords co-occurrence analysis.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Trend topics of author keywords over time.
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Grants and funding

This study was funded by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81473759).