Global research trends of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) in the past two decades: a bibliometric and visualized study

Background Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) has become one of the most common and serious adverse drug reactions owing to its high morbidity and leading cause of hepatic failures, which had attracted great attentions worldwide in the past two decades. A need therefore exists to conduct a bibliometric and visualized analysis of the global research trends on DILI with the aim of identifying the status of current research and prioritize the future research areas. Methods Publications related to DILI from 1999 to 2019 were extracted through an electronic search of the Web of Science (WoS) and PubMed databases. VOSviewer software was used to perform visualized analysis of bibliographic coupling, co-authorship, co-citation and co-occurrence, and to assess the global trends. Results Totally of 6,563 publications were identified based on the inclusion criteria. It is noted that the global trends of literatures on DILI showed a significant increase over time and more importantly predict the relevant publications will rise continuously in the coming decades. The United States led in terms of publication numbers with the most citations (the highest h-index). Hepatology made great contributions to the highest h-index and the most citations of publications. University of North Carolina was regarded as the most contributive institution. Notably, after conducting co-occurrence and cluster analysis of keywords and citation networks, it is shown that the pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, diagnosis and risk factors of this field will become the most prominent research hotspots. Conclusions The mapping results provides global development trends of publications on DILI from 1999 to 2019. Future studies focused on the diagnosis and predisposing factors of this field will be encouraged.