An evolutive and scientometric research on tissue engineering reviews

Research Article Title: An evolutive and scientometric research on tissue engineering reviews. Authors: Martin-Piedra, Miguel Angel1. PhD ([email protected]); Santisteban-Espejo, Antonio1,2. PhD (antonio[email protected]); Moral-Munoz, Jose Antonio3. PhD ([email protected]); Campos, Fernando1. PhD ([email protected]s); ChatoAstrain, Jesus1. MSc ([email protected]); Garcia-Garcia, Oscar Dario1. MSc (garc[email protected]); Sanchez-Porras, David1. MSc ([email protected]); Campos, Antonio1. PhD (a[email protected]). 1. Tissue engineering group, Department of Histology, School of Medicine, University of Granada. Research Institute ibs.GRANADA. Avda. Investigacion 11, 5A. 18071 Granada, Spain. +34 958243515 2. Division of Hematology and Hemotherapy. Puerta del Mar Hospital, Avda. Ana de Viya, 21, 11009 Cádiz, Spain. +34 958243515. 3. Department of Nursing and Physiotherapy, University of Cadiz, School of Nursing and Physiotherapy. Institute of Research and Innovation in Biomedical Sciences of the Province of Cadiz (INiBICA). Avda. Ana de Viya, 52, 11009 Cádiz, Spain. +34 956019096 Corresponding author: Antonio Santisteban-Espejo Division of Hematology and Hemotherapy Hospital Universitario Puerta del Mar Hospital, Avda. Ana de Viya, 21, 11009 Cádiz, Spain +34 958243515 [email protected] ABSTRACT Publication numbers have been widely used as measure of research output, especially academic and university research. Publication numbers in tissue engineering (TE) have increased year by year since early 1990s. However, after an exponential growth phase, recently publications increase at lower rates, suggesting a consolidation process in which reviews become a relevant and high evidence document type. The aim of this study is to perform a scientometric evaluation of published literature reviews on TE in order to assess the status of scientific evolution and confirm the consolidation of TE as a research area. Published reviews on TE from 1991 to 2018 were retrieved from Web of Science core collection and this corpus of knowledge was analyzed by growth rate, research area, source title and citation. Our results revealed that TE can be considered a consolidating area as it leaves the forefront stage of a gompertzian growth curve model. Original research/review ratio is lineally decreasing during the last decade. The emergence of reviews serves to confirm and refute hypothesis and build up a more reliable theoretical framework as well as a guide for future educational approaches. Distribution assessment of categories and journals indicates the multidisciplinary profile of this area focused on the design and development of new tissues. Biomedical sciences become relevant productors of reviews to as they need to support TE innovations with high evidence leading to a safer and more efficient treatment of current injuries and diseases. IMPACT STATEMENT Scientometric analysis of published reviews about tissue engineering suggests that can be considered a consolidating area as it leaves the forefront stage of a gompertzian growth curve model. Biomedical sciences become relevant productors of reviews as they need to support TE innovations with high evidence leading to a safer and more efficient treatment of current injuries and diseases. Keywords: Tissue engineering, literature reviews, scientometrics, evolution, advanced therapies. INTRODUCTION The output of information in science is overwhelming. In 1961 Derek J. de Solla Price published the first quantitative data about the growth of science from 1650 to 1950. His data showed an exponential growth rate of publication, increasing about 5.6% per year and a doubling time of 13 years. The number of articles recorded for 1950 was about 60,000 and the forecast for year 2000 was about 1,000,000 1. Recent research studying science output up to 2012 have identified different stages of growth in terms of published documents and cited references 2. After the First World War, and as a consequence of economic growth, science started to increase at 8% each year, doubling every 9 years, revealing an overgrowth stage followed by a decrease in the rate of publication and the consolidation of research. Publication numbers have been used as measures of the output of research, especially academic research and university research. Analysis of publication numbers are based on big databases for scientific publications. Some of the databases also give the basis for measurements of citation, which are usually used as indicators of the quality of publications 3. Specifically, recent reports are trying to characterize tissue engineering as a consolidating research field through scientometric analyses on the corpus of literature 4,5. Tissue engineering (TE) is an area of research aimed to the development of artificial tissues and organs that could restore maintain or even improve anatomical and/or functional integrity of injuried tissues 6. From early 90s, it has been reported that publication numbers in TE have increased year by year. However, after an exponential growth phase, recent years publications increase at lower rates, suggesting a consolidation process 5. Even, the literature reviews play a key role in consolidation of obtained knowledge 7. Reviews are in great demand and their need stems from that ever-increasing output of scientific publications 8,9. Literature reviews provide a much-needed bridge between the vast and scattered amount of articles on a topic and the reader who does not have time or resources to track them down. Even, there is a wide heterogeneity in the quality of published information and its impact. Good science influences the direction of science itself, and the development of new technologies and social policies. Poor science leads to dead ends, either because it fails to advance understanding in useful ways or because it contains important errors. Poor science produces papers that can eventually feed the fireplace, or in a more modern and ecologically friendly version, the accumulation of electronic documents 10. Reviews show the capability to discriminate between good and poor science, emerging conclusions of a scope and theoretical level that experimental reports cannot normally address 11. In addition, its role in educational activities is relevant as a source of selected, updated and rigorous knowledge to be transmitted in the different educational levels through appropriate didactic approaches. Consequently, literature reviews may play a key role in the synthesis, the construction of theories and learning in research areas that have gathered a large amount of empirical information. The aim of the present work is the scientometric research of published literature reviews on TE from 1991 to 2018 in order to assess the status of scientific evolution and confirm the consolidation of TE as a research area. MATERIAL AND METHODS Analyzed metadata used in this investigation were retrieved from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) core collection database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) (Philadelphia, PA, USA). WoS is considered one of the most complete and reliable databases of scientific information, gathering information of 8,917 scientific journals. Documents were retrieved by searching (“TISSUE ENGINEER*” or “TISSUEENGINEER*”) as topic on SCI-Expanded collection as previously described 5, from 1991 to 2018. Obtained results were filtered by publication type and only reviews were refined excluding other publications. All the reviews referring to TE in the past 28 years (from 1991 to 2018) were assessed by growth rate, WoS research areas and categories, source title and citation count. Leading to a further comprehension of global trends, some of these analyses were performed over 3 time groups: (1) from 1991 to 1999, (2) from 2000 to 2008 and (3) from 2009 to 2018. The selection of these ranges were adjusted to global production taking into account that the amount of documents is higher as time goes nearer to nowadays. RESULTS Growth rate of publication 7,084 published reviews were retrieved from ISI Web of Science after performing the search strategy previously described, ranging 28 years of global production that form the corpus of review literature at TE. From 1991 to 1999, 55 reviews (0.78% of total production) were reported. This growth rate of production starts increasing from 2000 to 2008 with the publication of 1248 reviews (17.62%) and mainly during the last decade, from 2009 to 2018, when 5781 reviews on TE (81.61%) were retrieved. The rate of review publication can be closely adjusted to a third degree polynomic model y = 0.584x3 – 8.874x2 + 44.378x – 56.523 (R² = 0.999) that can be used to predict the report of new reviews in the near future. In this sense, the publication rate will probably keep increasing during the last decade and it can be estimated that the total amount of reviews will be higher than threefold current production in 2029. The growth rate of publication of original research can also be correlated to a polynomic model (y = 2.194x3 – 4.331x2 – 171.21x + 546.3; R² = 0.999), as reviews do. However, these two document types are not increasing at the same rate. In fact, ratio original research/review has been lineally decreasing from 1991 to 2018 (y = -0.099x + 8.551; R² = 0.905), mainly during the last evaluated subperiod, from 2009 to 2018 (Figure 1) Research areas Retrieved documents show a highly heterogeneus pattern of distribution among Web of Science research areas. A total of 131 scientific research areas (excluding Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences) are implied in the corpus of TE reviews. The most productive research areas were “Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology” (8.11%), “Engineering Biomedical” (7.87%), “Cell and Tissue Engineering” (7.07%), “Cell Biology” (6.94%) and “Material Science Biomaterials” (6.80%). As can be seen in Figure 2, the production of reviews from 1991 to 1999 is very low probably due to the absence of data during the first decade of TE development as a scientific discipline. The growth of these research areas has been increasing from 2004 to nowadays with similar rates. When taken together, these five research areas gathers 36.79% of the total number of reviews and each one presents relative weights that are very similar, mainly since 2007 to nowadays (Figure 3). Source title The publication of TE reviews presents a wide range in terms of source titles and up to 1451 different journals have reported at least one of the 7084 retrieved documents. Nevertheless, the distribution of reviews in this journals is not homogeneous as 83.18% (1207 journals) have reported 5 or less reviews at the same time as 1.03% (15 journals) are implied in the publication of 20% total reviews. The Bradford’s journals core, a set of journals publishing 25% of total amount of documents in a scientific discipline, has been increasing from the first decade (3 journals), through the second subperiod, when the Bradford’s core was composed by 10 journals and finally, from 2009 to 2018 up to 20 journals (Table 1). Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, Tissue Engineering Part B Reviews, Biomaterials and Acta Biomaterialia are considered the most productive sources with more than 100 documents each of them and gathering almost 10% of the whole corpus. Citation analysis Total citation count was obtained from WoS as an index of the global impact of TE reviews. The average citation resulted in 62.69 citing articles per document. Analyzed Hirsch-index was obtained to be 286. 1780 of 7084 total reviews (25.12%) obtained less than 5 cites. However, more than half (52.65%) of all the retrieved reviews were published during the last 5 years, which suggest that a significant amount of reviews have not yet reached their real impact in terms of citation as they collect 15.83% of total citation. Most relevant reviews, documents with highest citation, could be identified. 6.59% reviews collected more than 100 cites, 1.95% of total documents achieved more than 500 cites and there are up to 39 reviews (0.55%) gathering more than 1000 cites, which could be considered as keystone papers. The 10 most cited reviews and its citation are shown in Table 3. All these keystone reviews presents more than 2000 cites each one. Even when taken together these 10 documents (0.14% total reviews), they accumulate 25530 cites (5.74% total citation). These top cited reviews are not recent as its year of publication ranges from 2001 to 2010, suggesting that it is not possible to stimate real impact of an important extract of the corpus of TE reviews. 9 of these 10 top cited reviews are focused on the importance of biomaterials research, hydrogels and polymeric biomaterials with suitable use as cell scaffolds, suggesting this is one of the major challenges faced by TE as a scientific discipline. DISCUSSION The notion of tissue engineering first appeared in 1988 as an alternative clinical approach when transplantation of living tissues has failed 12. During the last 30 years, tissue engineering has developed becoming a consolidating research field with a corpus of literature composed by more than 34,000 high-impact published scientific documents 5. The scientometric study of the production of tissue engineering is interesting and necessary as it allows arising the evolution patterns of that field of knowledge. Even, as Freedman stated, science is a human activity focused not only in the obtention of increasingly fuller and more accurate knowledge of nature. Science is also related with an increasing potential to adapt itself and change its environment 13. In this sense, tissue 7. Thomas, J. and Harden, A. Methods for the thematic synthesis of qualitative research in systematic reviews. BMC Med Res Methodol 8, 45, 2008. 8. Pautasso, M. 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