Antifungals from plants: a bibliometric analysis of the last two decades (2000-2020)

Résumé 0

This study aimed to analyse the world scientific production on antifungals from plants indexed in the Scopus database (2000-2020), highlighting the Cuban scientific production on this topic as a case study. Scopus raw data based on “antifungal” and “plants” hits were cleaned using the OpenRefine tool to eliminate similar and duplicate results. Cleaned data was processed using VOSviewer software for keyword-based bibliometric analysis. The 5000 most common words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English were excluded. A co-occurrence analysis was performed taking into account only authors keywords and using the complete count method. 24 084 documents were identified, of which 85.8% were original articles and 9.6% were reviews. The most productive journals were Journals of Ethnopharmacology, Natural Product Research and Fitoterapia. The annual scientific production was uniform with a linear growth. The thematic structure according to the co-occurrence network indicates that the most frequent terms were “essential oils”, “antioxidant”, “medicinal plants”, “Candida albicans” and “flavonoids”. In the case of Cuba, of the 64 publications on the subject, 90.6% were original articles and 6.3% were reviews. The Cuban magazines with the highest production were Revista Cubana de Plantas Medicinales and Biotecnología Aplicada. The most frequent terms according to the co-occurrence network in Cuban publications were “Staphylococcus aureus”, “Candida albicans”, “plant leaf”, “antimicrobial activity”, “medicinal plants” and “flavonoids”. These results prove that the global scientific community as well as the Cuban scientist are interested on the topic, further demonstrating that plants could become a reliable source of antifungal drugs.