Evolutionary trends of plague research from 2016 to 2025: A bibliometric analysis

Plague is a severe zoonotic disease caused by Yersinia pestis, a pathogen characterized by high infectivity and mortality rates. Historically, three global pandemics have inflicted heavy disasters on human society. Despite improvements in control measures and the application of antibiotics, plague has been somewhat controlled; however, since the beginning of the 21st century, plague outbreaks have continued to occur in regions with a high burden of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. In recent years, the rapid development of technologies such as molecular biology, immunology, and bioinformatics has propelled significant advancements in plague diagnostics, vaccine development, and transmission mechanisms. However, there has been a lack of systematic quantitative analysis of the distribution characteristics, evolving hotspots, and frontier trends of plague research, which makes it challenging to provide comprehensive scientific support for research and control decision-making.

Search for relevant literatures on plague that were published in the Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed database from January 1, 2016 to November 12, 2025.Bibliometric methods were adopted, and software including COOC 20.6, VOSviewer 1.6.20, and Anaconda were used to analyze the publication trend, distribution of institutions, national cooperation network, keyword co-occurrence clustering, and the annual variation trends.

A total of 1994 documents were finally included. The annual number of publications showed an overall fluctuating upward trend, with a significant growth rate from 2020 to 2021 (annual growth rate of 10.44%). Core research institutions included the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology. The United States, China, France and Madagascar were the main core countries for cooperation. Keyword co-occurrence clustering identified five major research fields, which were plague vaccine development and immune mechanism, ecology and vector control, historical epidemiology and public health, epidemiology and transmission chain, and plague-related infectious diseases and biosafety. The research trends analysis showed that from 2016 to 2020, the plague research mainly focused on keywords such as "Rodents" "Epidemiological Survey" "Human Plague" and "Fleas". From 2021 to 2025, "Phylogenetic Analysis," "Public Health," and "Madagascar" newly entered the top 20 keyword list; the frequencies of "Black Death" and "Infectious Disease" increased significantly, while the frequencies of "Plague Vaccine" and "Prairie Dogs" remained relatively stable.

Over the past decade, remarkable achievements have been made in plague research. Interdisciplinary integration and technological innovation have continued to deepen. However, global collaboration remains insufficiently developed. In the future, it is necessary to foster broader cross-regional cooperation, accelerate the research, development and translation of vaccines and diagnostic technologies, integrate multiple technologies to construct a precise prevention and control system. and enhance the global collaborative prevention and control capabilities of plague.