A worldwide bibliometric analysis of triptolide research from 1997 to 2021

In recent years, triptolide has received much attention due to its wide range of pharmacological activities. However, no bibliometric studies have been published on triptolide. This study conducted a bibliometric study to provide scientific and insightful information for further research.

This study performed a bibliometric study of articles published in the Web of Science database from 1997 to 2021. Based on the keywords used in relation to the title of the article containing the word triptolide, 970 publications were searched for further analysis. We used Microsoft Excel for frequency analysis, VOSviewer and CiteSpace for data visualization, and Rstudio for citation metrics and analysis.

After analysis, standard bibliometric indicators such as the growth of publications, prolific authors and coauthorship, country distributions, preferred journals, most influential institutions and top cited documents were presented in this study.

According to our findings, the number of triptolide-related publications has been increasing since 2009. China was the largest contributor to triptolide research, followed by the USA. Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy was the leading journal related to triptolide research. The most productive authors were Zhang LY (China Pharmaceut Univ) and Jiang ZZ (China Pharmaceut Univ). China Pharmaceutical University was the most influential institution in the field of triptolide research. Our findings suggest that the effective use of triptolide in cancer therapy as well as overcoming its multiorgan toxicity to promote its widespread clinical applications are expected to be hot research topics in the future.