Exploring the Knowledge Landscape of Escherichia coli Research: A Scientometric Overview

Abstract

Escherichia coli (E. coli) has the hallmark of being the most extensively studied organism. This is shown by the thousands of articles published since its discovery by T. Escherich in 1885. On the other hand, very little is known about the intellectual landscape in E. coli research. For example, how the trend of publications on E. coli has evolved over time and which scientific topics have been the focus of interest for researchers. In this chapter, we present the results of a large-scale scientometric analysis of about 100,000 bibliographic records from PubMed over the period 1981–2021. To examine the evolution of research topics over time, we divided the dataset into four intervals of equal width. We created co-occurrence networks from keywords indexed in the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary and systematically examined the structure and evolution of scientific knowledge about E. coli. The extracted research topics were visualized in strategic diagrams and qualitatively characterized in terms of their maturity and cohesion.