Dados do Trabalho

Título

WORLDWIDE PRODUCTION AND PROGRESS OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ON SPIRULINA (1967-2024)

Introdução

Spirulina is a biomass of cyanobacteria considered a superfood due to the expressive amount of proteins (>45%), vitamins (A, C and E), minerals, essential fatty acids (γ- linolenic acid) as well as pigments such as chlorophyll A and phycobiliproteins. It is a promising functional food for risk reduction of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disorders, and other conditions.

Material e Métodos

This study presents the first scientometric analysis of the worldwide scientific literature about spirulina from the Web of Science (WoS) database (1967- Mar 12th, 2024). The keywords used in the search were spirulina descriptors from DeCS/MeSH and genus/species described in the FAO report. The descriptive analysis was carried out using WoS, Microsoft Excel and CiteSpace.

Resultados e Discussão

From 8,703 scientific studies retrieved, 5,899 articles were selected for scientometric analysis. The number of publications increased by 11.3 times from 2002 to 2022 (record year of publications, with 622 articles), while the average of citations per year increased by 32.3 times in the same period. China (15.1% of the total scientific production), India (11.6%), USA (8.2%), Brazil (8.0%), Egypt (6.5 %) and Italy (5.7%) accounted for 55.1 % of world production. Among 18,425 authors, the most outstanding researcher is Jorge Alberto Vieira Costa, a Brazilian professor who published 2.4% of world production on spirulina (140 articles). Egyptian Knowledge Bank (Egypt; 6.4%), Federal University of Rio Grande (Brazil; 3.1%) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (China; 2.8%) leads the scientific production on spirulina. Almost 70% of studies are concentrated in the areas of Biotechnology/Applied Microbiology (18.8%), Chemistry (14.3%), Food Science and Technology (12.5%), Engineering (11.8%) and Biochemistry/ Molecular Biology (10.2%) areas. National Natural Science Foundation of China is the main funding agency (6.8% of world research), followed by Brazilian agencies, Capes and CNPq (6.5%). Bioresource technology (3.5%) and Journal of applied phycology (3.2%) are the most outstanding journals. China is the country with the highest citation count, followed by India, USA and Brazil, which lead the largest clusters (more than 20 members). The longest (36 years) citation burst happened in Japan.

Conclusão

Studies on spirulina are in increasing progress, mainly in the last decade.