Global research hotspots and research trends on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: a bibliometric and visualization analysis

Background: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a life-threatening disease, the progression of which current drug therapy cannot reverse. This study analyzed current research hotspots and future research trends in IPF through bibliometric methods, with the aim of providing a reference for new therapeutic strategies. Methods: Publications on IPF obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database, The Literature Metrology Online Analysis Platform, and CiteSpace were used to analyze publication characteristics. VOSviewer was used to conduct keywords co-occurrence analysis and analyze research hotspots. Results: A total of 7,016 publications related to IPF were identified from 2011 to 2020. The most contributions were from the USA and the five research institutions with the largest number of publications were all from that country. The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine was the most cited journal and had an incontrovertible academic impact with five of the top 10 high-cited references published in this journal. G Raghu was the academic authority in this domain in terms of both the number of publications and the most citations. By analyzing keywords, we identified three IPF research hotspot clusters, which are "clinical research", "pathogenesis research" and "diagnosis research" respectively. Conclusions: We evaluated all publications concerning IPF research in the past decade through bibliometric analysis. The current research hotspot in this field is drug therapy for the condition using nintedanib and pirfenidone. Future research will focus on conducting multi-center randomized controlled trials to explore and evaluate new therapeutic drugs for IPF. It is hoped that this study can provide information and data support for further research and the development of new therapeutic drugs.