Trends and performance of oxidative stress research from 1991 to 2010

A bibliometric analysis was performed in this work to determine research trends of oxidative stress publications published between 1991 and 2010 in journals of all the subject categories of the Science citation index. Publication trends were analyzed by the retrieved results in publication type and language, characteristics of articles outputs, country, subject categories and journals, and the frequency of title-words and keywords used. Over the years, there was a significant growth in article outputs, with more countries participating and collaborating. The seven major industrialized countries (G7) published the majority of the world articles while the USA contributed about one-third of the total. Chinese and Indian outputs grew much faster than those of other countries in the past 5 years. Oxidative stress research in food and environmental related fields gradually became the mainstream of the research. An analysis of the title-words, author keywords and keywords plus showed that antioxidants in human or rat cells were the hot topic in the field. In addition, “reaction oxygen species”, “apoptosis”, and “nitric-oxide” were major topics of oxidative stress research recently. More articles dealt with diseases that had a strong relationship with oxidative stress, such as inflammation, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and atherosclerosis.