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Rodriguez-Salvador, et al.
A B

Figure 5. Co-occurrence network maps. (A) Top authors cooccurrence. (B) Top affiliations cooccurrence.

Markwald, and Richard P Visconti; these authors represent biology, engineering, and materials science that constitute
the biggest collaborating network. Other main authors, 60% of the publications.
such as Yasuyuki Sakai, Gerhard Björn Stark, and Jeffrey Our findings also revealed a growing interest on tissue
R. Morgan, were also visualized working with their own spheroids research, evidenced by the biggest leap of scientific
research groups. production particularly in the past 5 years. The United States
As to the institutions, we identified that the and Japan were found to be the most prolific countries, for
University of South Carolina has the closest collaboration being ranked in the top ten positions and authoring more
with the Clemson University. Another substantial than half of the documents analyzed. Nevertheless, the most
collaborator is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prolific city was Seoul, South Korea; this might be due to the
with both Harvard University and the National University centralization of the research centers in this capital. The most
of Singapore. Finally, the Kyushu University collaborates prolific author was found to be Vladimir Mironov, followed
closely with Osaka University. by Vladimir Kasyanov, probably due to the fact that they
collaborate closely, representing an interesting finding in
4. Conclusions the network of authors collaboration. The top three journals
identified were Biomaterials, Acta Biomaterialia, and Tissue
This study assessed the scientific research dynamics Engineering – Part A. The main institutions identified are
of tissue spheroids through a CTI process using a directly related to the most prolific countries. For instance,
scientometric analysis. To accomplish this, scientific Kyushu University and the University of Tokyo in Japan
publications published between January 1, 2000, and were both tied at number one position, followed by the
June 5, 2019, were retrieved from Scopus and WoS, institutions in the United States: University of California in
before organization and analysis. Four fundamental the second place whereas Harvard University, Massachusetts
trends were detected: tissue spheroids as building Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan tied
blocks, tissue spheroids for drug testing and disease at the third place.
models, spheroid formation analysis, and complementary Insights obtained in this study show the main trends
studies. Different types of bioinks and cells, ranging of published research in tissue spheroids. These findings
from healthy cells to carcinogenic cells, were also may help guide research efforts in the tissue engineering
identified. In addition, subject area distributions as well and regenerative medicine, supporting the development of
as the most prolific countries, cities, authors, journals, new technological applications that would revolutionize
and institutions regarding this topic were identified to the health industry in the coming years.
determine the overall research publications landscape, as
well as a network of collaborations between institutions Acknowledgments
and authors.
Our results exhibit that tissue spheroids research The authors acknowledge institutional funding
covers nine subject areas: biochemistry, genetics and received from Tecnológico de Monterrey and Consejo
molecular biology, engineering, materials science, Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT).
chemical engineering, medicine, chemistry, immunology Conflicts of interest
and microbiology, applied physics, and others, with
an emphasis on biochemistry, genetics, and molecular The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

International Journal of Bioprinting (2021)–Volume 7, Issue 1 143