Scientific progress regarding neural regeneration in the Web of Science

Yuntao Pan; Yuhua Zhang; Xiaopei Gao; Jia Jia; Jiping Gao; Zheng Ma

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5374.2013.36.011

摘要：BACKGROUND: Neural regeneration fol owing nerve injury is an emerging field that attracts ex-tending interests al over the world. OBJECTIVE: To use bibliometric indexes to track studies focusing on neural regeneration, and to investigate the relationships among geographic origin, countries and institutes, keywords in the published articles, and especial y focus on the region distribution, institution distribution, as wel as col aborations in Chinese papers indexed in the Web of Science. METHODS: A list of neural regeneration studies was generated by searching the database of the Web of Science-Expanded using the term“Neural Regenera*”. Inclusive criteria:(1) articles in the field of neural regeneration;(2) fundamental research on animals, clinical trials and case reports;(3) article types: article, review, proceedings paper, note, letter, editorial material, discussion, book chapter; (4) year of publication: 2003-2012; and (5) citation database: Science Citation In-dex-Expanded. Exclusive criteria: (1) articles requiring manual searching or with access only by telephone;(2) unpublished articles;and (3) corrections. RESULTS:A total of 4 893 papers were retrieved from the Web of Science published between 2003 and 2012. The papers covered 65 countries or regions, of which the United States ranked first with 1 691 papers. The most relevant papers were in the neurosciences and cellbiology, and the key-word “stem cel” was the most frequent. In recent years, China showed a great increase in the number of papers. Over the entire 10 years, there were 922 Chinese papers, with Jilin University ranking first with 58 articles. Chinese papers were published in connection with many countries, in-cluding the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Among the connections, the papers published by the Chinese and the American are 107, with the highest rate. With regard to funding, 689 articles were funded from various projects, occupying 74.72% of the total amount. In these projects, National Foundation and Science and Technology programs were the majority. CONCLUSION:Our bibliometric analysis provides a historical perspective on the progress of neural regeneration research. At present, the number of articles addressing neural regeneration is in-creasing rapidly; however, through analysis of citations it is clear that there is a long way to go to improve the academic quality.