Highly cited original research in microneedle science from 2015 to 2025 a bibliometric and altmetric analysis

This study comprehensively analyzes the top 100 highly cited publications in microneedle (MN) research to reveal convergences and divergences in academic and public interest, assess the current research landscape and its impact, and offer data-driven support for clarifying future research directions.We identified highly cited microneedle articles published from 2015 to July 15, 2025 using the Web of Science database, validated the records through Scopus and Google Scholar, and gathered Altmetric attention scores from Altmetric.Extracted data encompassed citation counts, publication years, journals, authors, affiliations, and countries, which we summarized using descriptive statistics and visualized with CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and R for correlation analysis.From 8502 documents, the top 100 most-cited original research articles were selected. These articles appeared in 43 English-language journals and accrued 23,838 citations. The highest annual output occurred in 2020, with 18 publications and 4172 citations, while the top 10 journals together accounted for more than 60% of the highly cited articles. Zhen Gu authored the most articles (18), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led all institutions with 17 contributions.Our analysis suggests that microneedle research has expanded beyond conventional transdermal delivery into a diverse technological ecosystem encompassing clinical therapy, immunomodulation, smart diagnostics and therapeutics, and material sustainability. Among the most-cited microneedle articles in this analysis, Altmetric Attention Scores and citation metrics captured distinct dimensions of influence, with the former correlating more strongly with news and social media dissemination than with traditional citation counts. This divergence indicates a partial disconnect between public visibility and scholarly impact in the field.