Vitamin D research subject popularity
Identification of Recent Trends in Research on Vitamin D: A Quantitative and Co-Word Analysis
Med Sci Monit 2019; 25:643-655, DOI: 10.12659/MSM.913026
Aolin Yang, Qingqing Lv, Feng Chen, Difei Wang, Ying Liu, Wanying Shi
Department of Nutrition, The First Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China (mainland)
📄 Download the PDF from VitaminDWiki
Recent subject popularity
BACKGROUND: In recent years, many studies on vitamin D have been published. We combed these data for hot spot analyses and predicted future research topic trends.
MATERIAL AND METHODS: Articles (4625) concerning vitamin D published in the past 3 years were selected as a study sample. Bibliographic Items Co-occurrence Matrix Builder (BICOMB) software was used to screen high-frequency Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and construct a MeSH terms-source article matrix and MeSH terms co-occurrence matrix. Then, Graphical Clustering Toolkit (gCLUTO) software was employed to analyze the matrix by double-clustering and visual analysis to detect the trends on the subject.
RESULTS: Ninety high-frequency major MeSH terms were obtained from 4625 articles and divided into 5 clusters, and we generated a visualized matrix and a mountain map. Strategic coordinates were established by the co-occurrence matrix of the MeSH terms based on the above classification, and the 5 clusters described above were further divided into 7 topics. We classified the vitamin D-related diseases into 12 categories and analyzed their distribution.
CONCLUSIONS: The analysis of strategic coordinates revealed that the epidemiological study of vitamin D deficiency and vitamin D-related diseases is a hot research topic. The use of vitamin D in the prevention and treatment of some diseases, especially diabetes, was found to have a significant potential future research value.