Abstract
BACKGROUND: The mTOR pathway is vital for homeostasis, metabolism, cancer transplantation and regeneration in the liver. The aim of this study is to use a bibliometric method to reveal current research hotspots and promising future trends in mTOR signaling in liver diseases. METHODS: Publications were searched and downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) Database. CiteSpace, Carrot2, and VOSviewer programs were utilized to analyze the contribution of various countries/regions, institutes, and authors; and to reveal research hotspots and promising future trends in this research area. RESULTS: Until May 21, 2019, a total of 2,232 papers regarding mTOR signaling pathway in liver disease were included, and each paper was cited 23.21 times on average. The most active country was the USA. 5 landmark articles with centrality and burstiness were determined by co-citation analysis. Research hotspots included "liver transplantation" "hepatic stellate cell proliferation" "NAFLD" "therapy of HCC". Moreover, six key clusters were discovered during the procedure of "clustering", including "liver transplantation" "protein synthesis" "mTOR inhibitor" "following early cyclosporine withdrawal" "srebp-1 activation", and "hepatocellular cancer". CONCLUSIONS: Various scientific methods were applied to reveal scientific productivity, collaboration, and research hotspots in the mTOR signaling pathway in liver disease. Liver transplantation, hepatic stellate cell proliferation, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), therapy of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), cell growth and autophagy, are research hotspots and are likely to be promising in the next few years. Further studies in this field are needed.