The Trends of Single-Cell Analysis: A Global Study

OBJECTIVE: The field of single-cell analysis has rapidly grown worldwide, and a bibliometric analysis and visualization of data and publications pertaining to such single-cell research has the potential to offer insights into the development of this field over the past two decades while also highlighting future avenues of research. METHODS: Single-cell analysis-related studies published from 2000-2019 were identified through searches of the Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed databases, and corresponding bibliometric data were systematically compiled. Extracted data from each study included author names, country of origin, and affiliations. GraphPad Prism was used to analyze these data, while VOSviewer was used to perform global analyses of bibliographic coupling, coauthorship, cocitation, and co-occurrence. RESULTS: In total, 4,071 relevant studies were included in this analysis. The number of publications increased substantially with time, suggesting that single-cell analyses are becoming increasingly more prevalent in recent years. Studies from the USA had the greatest impact in this field, with higher H-index values and numbers of citations relative to other countries, whereas Israel exhibited the highest average number of citations per publication. Bibliographic coupling, coauthorship, cocitation, and co-occurrence analyses revealed that Analytical Chemistry was associated with the highest number of publications in this field, and the University of Stanford contributed the most to this field. The most cited study included in this analysis was published by Macosko et al. in 2015 in Cell. Co-occurrence analyses revealed that the most common single-cell research topics included “mechanistic studies,” “in vitro studies,” “in vivo studies,” and “fabrication studies.” CONCLUSIONS: Single-cell analyses are a rapidly growing area of scientific interest, and higher volumes of publications in this field are expected in the coming years, particularly for studies conducting fabrication and in vivo single-cell analyses.