Emerging trends and hot spots in autoimmune thyroiditis research from 2000 to 2022: A bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Autoimmune thyroiditis (AIT) is the most common autoimmune disease, affecting 3-5% patients worldwide. In recent years, approximately 200 articles on AIT have been published annually in various journals. However, to date, no article has systematically assessed the related literature. Therefore, we conducted a bibliometric analysis on AIT to reveal the dynamic scientific developments and help researchers gain a global perspective while exploring the hotspots and development trends. METHODS: AIT-related articles and reviews from 2000 to 2022 were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The following search terms were used to extract document data: TS= (“ autoimmune thyroiditi*”) OR TI= (“chronic lymphocytic thyroiditi*”) OR TI=(hashimoto*) OR TI= (“postpartum thyroiditis”). We selected articles and reviews published in English from 2000 to 2022. Three software programs (VOSviewer, CiteSpace, Pajek) were employed to analyze the contribution and co-occurrence relationships of different references, countries/regions, institutes, journals and also keywords in this field. RESULTS: This scientometric study included 2290 English papers published in 723 journals with 39661 co-cited references from 561 institutions in 120 countries/regions. Based on the reference and keyword analysis, researchers used to focus on “apoptosis”, “insulin resistance”, “encephalopathy”, “IFN-γ” related to AIT during the past 20 years. However, with the development of other novel directions such as “papillary thyroid cancer” (2018-2022), “Vitamin D” (2016-2022), “oxidative stress” (2018-2022), “polymorphism” (2019-2022) and “association” (2020-2022), researchers are more interested in the relationship between papillary thyroid carcinoma and AIT, the effect of vitamin D supplementation on AIT, the oxidative stress in thyroid disease as well as the influence of polymorphism. CONCLUSION: Bibliometric analysis of the outputs of AIT shows an overview of the current status of the research on AIT. The associations between papillary thyroid carcinoma, vitamin D, oxidative stress, polymorphism and AIT are major research frontiers. However, further research and collaboration are still required worldwide. Our findings can help researchers grasp the research status of AIT and quickly determine new directions for future research.