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Updated: Jul 11, 2025

Characterization of Immune Cells and Proinflammatory Mediators in the Pulmonary Environment
Published on: June 24, 2020
The future landscape of immunology in COPD: A bibliometric analysis
Yujie Sun1, Fan Jiang2, Rui Li1
1Respiratory Research Institute, Senior Department of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, The 8th Medical Center of PLA General Hospital, Beijing, 100091, China; Beijing Key Laboratory of OTIR, Beijing, 100091, China.
Background:
This study was conducted to provide a comparative and comprehensive analysis of the last 50 years of research in the immunology of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and to identify future research priorities and directions.
Methods:
We obtained publication information from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database. Scimago Graphica, CiteSpace, VOSviewer, GraphPad Prism, Microsoft Excel 365, and the R package "bibliometrix" were used for bibliometric analysis. The methodologies used were burst citation, clustering and co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, and cooperative network graph clustering algorithms.
Results:
A total of 2239 articles and reviews were included in the analysis. The number of annual publications showed an upward trend amidst fluctuations. The countries, institutions, journals, and authors with the highest number of publications were the USA, Imperial College London (ICL), Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and Murphy TF. There are 58 references and 13 keywords with a burst citation nature in the last 3 years, related to the study of inflammatory mechanisms.
Conclusion:
We used bibliometric analysis to understand the research progress regarding immune function in COPD. Meanwhile, we found that the hotspots of COPD immunology in basic research focus on the analysis of etiology and risk factors, and the exploration of the immune system; and the hotspots of COPD in clinical research focus on epidemiology, and the prevention and management of different subtypes of COPD.
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