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Tissue Spheroids as Building Blocks: A Scientometric Analysis
41 overall publications (18%), United States was the publications each. Regarding the top cities for overall
most prolific country. The second and third most prolific publications, the top three were Beijing, China (13
countries were China and Japan, with 37 (16%) and publications, 4%); Tokyo, Japan (10 publications, 3%);
30 (13%) overall publications, respectively. Analysis and Guangzhou, China (10 publications, 3%). The
of the Seeding category showed that United States was analysis of the Seeding category showed that the most
the most prolific country with 29 (17%) publications, prolific city was Beijing, China with 10 publications (5%),
followed by Japan and China with 25 (15%) each. In followed by Tokyo, Japan with nine publications (4%),
Biofabrication category, the United States and China and Guangzhou, China with 8 publications (3%). Finally,
were the two most prolific countries with 12 (21%) the analysis of the Biofabrication category showed that
publications each, the second most prolific countries the most prolific cities were Seoul, South Korea (3
were Germany, Japan, and South Korea with 5 (9%) publications, 4%), Beijing, China (3 publications, 4%);
and ten cities with 2 publications each (3%): Cambridge,
United States; Cambridge, United Kingdom; Fukuoka,
Japan; Guangzhou, China; Hangzhou, China; Heidelberg,
Germany; London, United Kingdom; Maastricht,
Netherlands; Moscow, Russia; and New York City,
United States.
Among all publications in this study, a total of 1304
authors were identified. However, distinguishing the
leading authors from other authors could not be achieved
in this study since the use of tissue spheroids as building
blocks is still a novel technology. Nevertheless, the top-
cited Scopus articles in this study are presented in Table 1
(overall as building blocks), Table 2 (building blocks
in the Seeding category), and Table 3 (building blocks
in the Biofabrication category). The top 6 cited Scopus
Figure 3. The number of publications on the use of tissue spheroids
as building blocks, by year of publication. The straight blue line publications overall belong to the seeding category. The
corresponds to overall publications, dashed purple line corresponds most cited article overall and in the Seeding category,
to the seeding category, and dashed yellow line corresponds to the with 119 citations, was Allogeneic bone marrow-derived
biofabrication category. mesenchymal stromal cells for hepatitis B virus-related

A B

C D

Figure 4. Global scientific trends in tissue spheroids as building blocks. A summary of the publications that are indexed in Scopus according
to (A) the ten most frequent countries and (B) cities of the authors; (C) the ten journals with the most occurrences of the searched terms; and
(D) the ten most frequent organizational affiliations of the authors.

194 International Journal of Bioprinting (2022)–Volume 8, Issue 3