Abstract
<i>Objectives:</i> Drug repurposing (DR), a promising tool to accelerate drug discovery, has increasingly drawn scientists’ attention. This study aims to explore the landscape of DR through visualization analysis on DR-related publications. <i>Methods:</i> Data were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection between 2000 and 2018. Data was analyzed in terms of publication outputs, journals, countries, institutions, authors, co-authorship, co-citation, research hotspots and evolution trends through VOSviewer and CiteSpace. <i>Results:</i> From 2000 to 2018, we can see a continuous growth in the number of DR related publications. <i>PLoS One</i> published the highest number of publications, followed by <i>Scientific Reports</i>, <i>Oncotarget and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy</i>. The United States (USA) was the most leading country in DR research, in terms of publications, institutions, co-authorship and co-citation. Talevi A (Argentina) was the most productive authors and Ashburn TT (USA) contributed the most cited articles in this area. The hotspots of DR research were cancer, drug discovery, apoptosis, polypharmacology and virtual screening, whereas the emerging trends of DR were connectivity map, database, pathway and apoptosis. <i>Conclusions:</i> This study might help beginners to quickly understand the cutting-edge knowledge, mainstream research directions, hot spots and research trends of this research field.
Highlights
Drug repurposing (DR) is defined as exploiting novel indications for existing drugs beyond its original uses or initial approved indications [1]
Drug repurposing has aroused the attention of drug companies, as the increasing high costs and disappointing success rate of drug discovery process [3]
Sildenafil, is the world-wide known example of drug repurposing, which was originally developed for angina pectoris treatment but, due to continual erections adverse event, was repurposed for erectile dysfunction [5]
Summary
Drug repurposing (DR) is defined as exploiting novel indications for existing drugs beyond its original uses or initial approved indications [1]. Repurposing can markedly lower the cost and shorten the development cycle, because of the definite pharmacokinetic and safety data of existing drugs [4]. A large number of DR studies have been published on academic journals, few efforts have been made to analyze the evolution of scientific outputs in this field systematically. Bibliometric analysis has been widespreadly used in various fields to assess previous research activity, track evolution process and explore research hotspots and frontiers [6,7,8,9,10,11]. Bibliometric analysis was employed to obtain the quantitative and visual information in the global scientific outputs of DR research from 2000 to 2018, identify its pivotal points and emerging trends
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