Trends in Naegleria Fowleri Global Research: a Bibliometric Analysis Study

Abstract

Naegleria fowleri is one of the most dangerous protozoan agents. This article describes a bibliometric review of the literature on N. fowleri research indexed in WoS during a 51-year period. The VOSviewer visualization meth-odology was used to conduct a bibliometric study. The data included articles from the Web of Science database, nations, institutions, journals, keywords, co-authorship, co-citations, international collaborations, and citation rates. A total of 1106 articles were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The articles were cited 21,904 times in total (cited 12,138 times without self-citations). The average citation per article was 19.82. The Hirsch index was 63. The leading country according to the number of published articles was the United States of America (USA) (n = 447; 40.416%), followed by Mexico (n = 80; 7.233%), and Australia (n = 63; 5.696%). Other than these top three countries, the publications were from 74 countries globally. Especially after the 2000s, both the number of citations and the number of publications exhibited an increasing trend. The Virginia Common-wealth University (USA) (9.584%), Centers for Disease Control Prevention (USA) (8.770%), and Instituto Poli-tecnico Nacional Mexico (4.069%) were the leading affiliations. Most of the leading affiliations were from the USA and Mexico. In conclusion, a bibliometric evaluation of N. fowleri was performed for the first time. Authors affiliated with institutions in the USA and Mexico have led scientific production on PAM. Efforts should be made to help developing countries with the highest prevalence of N. fowleri to develop scientific research networks with the USA and/or Mexico in order to increase research with interdisciplinary teams.