Abstract
Research question
What are the current research trends in human assisted reproduction around the world?
Design
An analysis of 26,000+ scientific publications (articles, letters and reviews) produced
worldwide between 2005 and 2016. The corpus of publications indexed in PubMed was
obtained by combining the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms: ‘Reproductive techniques’,
‘Reproductive medicine’, ‘Reproductive health’, ‘Fertility’, ‘Infertility’ and ‘Germ
cells’. An analysis was then carried out using text mining algorithms to obtain the
main topics of interest.
Results
A total of 44 main topics were identified, which were then further grouped into 11
categories: ‘Laboratory techniques’, ‘Male factor’, ‘Quality of ART, ethics and law’,
‘Female factor’, ‘Public health and infectious diseases’, ‘Basic research and genetics’,
‘Pregnancy complications and risks’, ‘General – infertility & ART’, ‘Psychosocial
aspects’, ‘Cancer’ and ‘Research methodology’. The USA was the leading country in
terms of number of publications, followed by the UK, China and France. Research content
in high-income countries is fairly homogeneous across categories and it is dominated
by ‘Laboratory techniques’ in Western-Southern Europe, and by ‘Quality of ART, ethics
and law’ in North America, Australia and New Zealand. ‘Laboratory techniques’ is also
the most abundant category on a yearly basis.
Conclusions
This study identifies the current hot topics on human assisted reproduction worldwide
and their temporal trends for 2005–2016. This provides an innovative picture of the
current research that could help explore the areas where further research is needed.
Keywords
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Biography
Dr Désirée García obtained her PhD at Barcelona University in 2017 and her BSc in Pharmacy in 2005. She also has a Master's Degree in Research Methodology and Statistics. In 2009, she joined Clínica EUGIN in Barcelona, where her current research focuses on reproductive medicine.
Article info
Publication history
Published online: October 29, 2019
Accepted:
October 18,
2019
Received in revised form:
October 17,
2019
Received:
July 19,
2019
Declaration: The authors report no financial or commercial conflicts of interest.Identification
Copyright
© 2019 Reproductive Healthcare Ltd. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
