Background Cirrhosis is a chronic consumption disease, whose impact on patients' physical function and nutritional status has been increasingly valued by the academic community. It is helpful to promote the innovation and development in nutrition for cirrhosis in China by reviewing the hotspots in global research on nutrition for cirrhosis periodically.
Objective To perform a bibliometric and visualized review of the development, hotspots, and trends of studies on nutrition for cirrhosis published from 1991 to 2021, providing a reference for future studies related to nutrition in cirrhosis.
Methods The studies about nutrition in cirrhosis published during 1991-2021 were searched from the database of Web of Science. Collaboration and co-occurrence network analyses supported by CiteSpace were used for data mining and visualization analysis of countries, institutions, authors, keywords, and burst keywords relevant to studies of nutrition in cirrhosis .
Results A total of 1 520 studies were finally included, the yearly number of these studies demonstrated a wave-like growth during the period of 1991-2021, in particular, it exceeded 100 in 2020 and 2021. The U.S. ranked first in terms of the number of published studies (424) and intermediary centrality value (0.32). As for institutions, Mayo Clinic (the U.S.) ranked first in terms of the number of published studies (25) and intermediary centrality value (0.08), followed by Gifu University (Japan), Cleveland Clinic (the U.S.), and Aarhus University Hospital (Denmark). Inter-institutional collaborative networks were formed in the U.S., with Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, as the core, and in Europe, with Charite (Germany) and Karolinska Institute (Sweden) as the core. A total of 891 authors were included in the collaborative network, represented by TANDON P and KAWAGUCHI T. High-frequency keywords included nutritional status, liver transplantation, and body composition. Sarcopenia was the keyword with the strongest citation bursts (strength 26.170 9) .
Conclusion Nutritional assessment, liver transplantation and body composition may be hot topics in research on nutrition in cirrhosis. And the pathophysiological mechanisms of malnutrition and nutritional management in patients with cirrhosis and sarcopenia may be foci of future research.
