Application of tissue engineering techniques in tracheal repair: a bibliometric study

ABSTRACT

Transplantation of tissue-engineered trachea is an effective treatment for long-segment tracheal injury. This technology avoids problems associated with a lack of donor resources and immune rejection, generating an artificial trachea with good biocompatibility. To our knowledge, a systematic summary of basic and clinical research on tissue-engineered trachea in the last 20 years has not been conducted. Here, we analyzed the development trends of tissue-engineered trachea research by bibliometric means and outlined the future perspectives in this field. The Web of Science portal was selected as the data source. CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and the Bibliometric Online Analysis Platform were used to analyze the number of publications, journals, countries, institutions, authors, and keywords from 475 screened studies. Between 2000 and 2023, the number of published studies on tissue-engineered trachea has been increasing. Biomaterials published the largest number of papers. The United States and China have made the largest contributions to this field. University College London published the highest number of studies, and the most productive researcher was an Italian scholar, Paolo Macchiarini. However, close collaborations between various researchers and institutions from different countries were generally lacking. Despite this, keyword analysis showed that manufacturing methods for tracheal stents, hydrogel materials, and 3D bioprinting technology are current popular research topics. Our bibliometric study will help scientists in this field gain an in-depth understanding of the current research progress and development trends to guide their future work, and researchers in related fields will benefit from the introduction to transplantation methods of tissue-engineered trachea.

HIGHLIGHTS

• We conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of tissue-engineered trachea.

• We systematically outlined the preparation methods and current development forms of tissue-engineered trachea.

• We predicted future tissue-engineered trachea research trends from the perspectives of countries, institutions, researchers, and popular research topics.

KEYWORDS:

• Bibliometric analysis
• tissue engineering
• tracheal transplantation
• hydrogel material
• three-dimensional bioprinting

Acknowledgments

We thank members of the teaching and research community in our group for their support and help with this study. We are grateful to the Yangzhou University for the high-quality experimental environment. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Author contributions

XXY, SZM, and SYB conceived and designed the study. LY organized the database. SF performed statistical analysis. XXY wrote the first draft of the manuscript. XXY, SYB, and SYQ wrote sections of the manuscript. SHC participated in the structure design of the article, was responsible for the final review and proofreading of the article, and provided research funding. All authors contributed to the manuscript revision, and read, and approved the submitted final version.

Data availability statement

The datasets for this study can be found in the [Web of Science] [https://www.webofscience.com/wos/alldb/basic-search].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 82070020) and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program for College Students of Jiangsu Province (No. 202211117106Y).