Development of Phage Display Technology: A Bibliometric Assessment

The paper presents results of bibliometric analysis of papers on phage display technology written in the past 30 years. More than 2000 Scopus-indexed papers have been published in 638 journals. 73.95% papers were published by 10 most productive countries out of 58: The USA, China, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, France and Australia. Rapid growth in scholarly output began in 1993, i.e., 8 years after discovery of phage display in 1985 and up to 2000 was equal to 26.85% per year. Later, the number of papers stabilized. In some countries, number of studies is decreasing: The USA, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Australia; the other countries show increase in the number of annually published papers: Germany, Japan, France and China. Average number of citations per paper in 3-year citation window is 5.09. Swiss papers are the most cited: 9.09 citations per paper, whereas Chinese papers are lowly cited ranking 2nd: 2.51 citations per paper. Results of studies on phage display are published in 11 languages with two leading ones: English (92.19%) and Chinese (6.29%). Biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology subject area uses phage display technology more intensively (61.04% papers), followed by immunology and microbiology (31.06%) and medicine (24.09%). The core of serials published the majority of papers on phage display began to lose strong borders. Only PLoS One shows obvious growth in the number of papers describing phage display studies.