Qingqing Wang,1 Huixiao Fu,2 Yining Zhang,3 Man Zhang,1 Jian Xu,1 Jian Fu1,4 

1College of Pharmacy, Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine/National Engineering Technology Research Center for Miao Medicine/Guizhou Engineering Technology Research Center for Processing and Preparation of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ethnic Medicine, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Science and Education, The First People’s Hospital of Guiyang, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China; 3College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 4State Key Laboratory of Functions and Applications of Medicinal Plants, Guizhou Medical University, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China

Correspondence: Huixiao Fu, Email fuhuixiao@126.com Jian Fu, Email fu_jian2008@163.com

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) poses a serious threat to public health, particularly owing to the increase in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB); thus, there is an imperative need for novel treatments to tackle this issue. Decaprenylphosphoryl-β-D-ribose 2′-epimerase (DprE1) is essential for mycobacterial cell wall integrity and viability. As no relevant bibliometric study has been reported, we performed bibliometric and visual analyses to depict the knowledge framework of research related to the involvement of DprE1 in TB.
Methods: Relevant studies were sourced from the Web of Science Core Collection database. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and bibliometrics (http://bibliometric.com/) were used to construct networks based on an analysis of journals, countries, funding, institutions, authors, references, and keywords.
Results: A total of 184 publications were retrieved; the total citations were 3405 times and the mean citation was 17.28 per article. The annual number of publications on DprE1 in TB has shown a significantly increasing trend. The European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry is the most published journal, with 19 articles. Lu Yu and Bin Wang contributed the most prolific authors with 18 articles. Stratified by the number of publications, India was the most prolific country that cooperated closely with the USA, UK, Japan, and United Arab Emirates. Burstness analysis of references and keywords showed that the developing research trends in this field mainly woven around “Mtb”, “DprE1” and “inhibitors” during the past years.
Conclusion: A systematic bibliometric study indicates that DprE1 remains a focal point in the anti-TB domain. These results can serve as a data-driven reference for future research and offer precise insights into the development of anti-TB agents associated with DprE1. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to comprehensively investigate DprE1 in TB by means of bibliometric analysis.

Keywords: DprE1 inhibitors, tuberculosis, drug target, CiteSpace, VOSviewer, R-bibliometrix