Sepsis-related immunosuppression: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Sepsis is one of the main causes of death in critically ill patients. Immunosuppression was involved deeply in the process of sepsis. The status of research on sepsis-related immunosuppression remains unclear. In this study, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to provide a preliminarily analysis of the current research status in sepsis-related immunosuppression. METHODS: The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) database in the Web of Science Core Collection was used as the data source for the literature search, and the time was set from the inception of the database to the last retrieval time for this study (i.e., May 21, 2022). Using the topic search, we searched for “sepsis” and then for “immunosuppression” in the results to obtain the final results. On the search page of the SCI-E database, we selected the document type, topic direction, MeSH topic heading, MeSH qualifier, keywords, author, journal, country, research institution, language, etc., to obtain the distribution results, and manually removed any duplicate records. We analyzed the use of keywords in the literature and the centrality of the authors, countries, and research institutions. RESULTS: A total of 4,132 articles were retrieved from the database over the search period of 1900 to May 21, 2022. The number of articles published increased annually. A trend of rapid growth was also observed in the number of citations. The most common topic words were humans, male, and female. The most used keywords were sepsis, immunosuppression, and male. The most published researcher was Monneret from Lyon, France. The authors of the article mainly specialized in immunology and surgery. Moldawer and Chaudry from the United States (US) had engaged in the most collaborations with other researchers. The journals that publish literature in this field are mainly journals related to critical care medicine, and the core journals included Shock, Critical Care, and Critical Care Medicine. CONCLUSIONS: More and more studies are being published on sepsis-related immunosuppression and largely being conducted in developed countries. Chinese researchers need to carry out more collaborative research.