Status and trends of personalized medicine research from 2000 to 2020: a bibliometric analysis

Personalized medicine (PM), as a rapidly growing research area, provides treatments, practices, and interventions being adapted to an individual patient based on his own risk of disease. This study aims to analyze the productivity of countries, institutions, and authors in this field, to determine the existing research trends worldwide, and to forecast future research activity for specific countries.

Documents published between 2000 and 2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database. Bibliometric analysis was performed to assess the outputs, correlation analysis was applied to analyze the relationship between Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP-PP) and the number of publications, and an extrapolation method was used for predicting the future productivity trends for certain countries.

A total of 7,772 documents were published globally on PM between 2000 and 2020. The most productive country, journal, and institution are the USA, Personalized Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, respectively. The USA is also first in line in terms of total citations. Netherlands, Denmark, and the USA are listed at the top in terms of the total number of papers and citations, after adjusting for GDP-PP and population size. Also, as predictions suggest, the USA will maintain its predominant role in the PM field in the next 5 years.

Owing to its both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature, PM bestows researchers' numerous sources to benefit and enables them a field that they can be productive of for the future. Therefore, this field is expected to progress and be the lead area in medicine in the upcoming years.