Research Landscape on Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease and Inflammation: A Bibliometric and Visualized Study

Abstract

Background: The atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) is a major killer and health care burden worldwide. Atherosclerosis, the common pathological foundation, has been associated with inflammation over the past few years. Some promising results also have emerged suggesting the role of targeting inflammation as a potential therapeutic option to reduce cardiovascular events. In light of the pathogenic role that inflammation plays in ASCVD, we propose to evaluate the worldwide research architecture for ASCVD and inflammation using bibliometric analysis. Methods: A search of the Web of Science Core Collection of Clarivate Analytics was performed for articles in the field published between 2012 and 2022. The number of publications per year has been visualized using GraphPad Prism through time. CiteSpace and VOSviewer were used to generate knowledge maps about the collaboration of countries, institutions, and authors, and to represent the landscape on ASCVD and inflammation research as well as to reveal current foci. Results: There were a total of 19,053 publications examined in this study. The most publications came from China (6232, 32.71%). Capital Med Univ was the most productive institution (410, 2.15%). Christian Weber published the greatest number of articles (75, 0.39%). PloS one was identified as the most prolific journal (706, 3.71%). Circulation was the most co-cited journal (13276, 2.81%). Keywords with the ongoing strong citation bursts were “nucleotide-binding oligomerization (NOD), Leucine-rich repeat (LRR)-containing protein (NLRP3) inflammasome”, “intestinal microbiota”, “exosome”, “lncRNAs”, etc. Conclusions: It can be shown that ASCVD and inflammation research benefited from manuscripts that had a high impact on the scientific community. Asian, European and North American countries dominated in the field in terms of quantitative, qualitative and collaborative parameters. The NLRP3 inflammasome, gut microbiota and trimethylamine N-oxide, autophagy, lncRNAs, exosomes, and nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 were described to be hot themes in the field.