Bibliometric Insights of Global Research Landscape in Mitophagy

Background: Autophagy is a highly regulated and evolutionarily conserved process in eukaryotes which is responsible for protein and organelle degradation. Although this process was described over 60 years ago, the selective autophagy of mitochondria (mitophagy) was recently coined in 2005. Research on the topic of mitophagy has made rapid progress in the past decade, which proposed to play critical roles in human health and disease. This study aimed to visualize the scientific outputs and research trends of mitophagy. Methods: Articles and reviews related to the topic of mitophagy were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection on 30 November 2021. Two kinds of software (CiteSpace and VOSviewer) were used to perform a visualized analysis of countries/regions, institutions, authors, journals, references, and keywords. Results: From 2005 to 2021, total 5844 publications on mitophagy were identified for final analysis. The annual number of publications grew yearly over the past 17 years. United States (N = 2025) and Chinese Academy of Sciences is the leading country and institute (N = 112) ranked by the number of publications, respectively. The most productive author was Jun Ren (N = 38) and Derek P. Narendra obtained the most co-cited times (2693 times). The journals with the highest output and the highest co-citation frequency were Autophagy (N = 208) and Journal of Biological Chemistry (co-citation: 17226), respectively. Analyses of references and keywords suggested that “mechanism of mitochondrial quality control”, “molecule and signaling pathway in mitophagy”, and “mitophagy related diseases” were research hotspots, and parkin-mediated mitophagy and its roles in skeletal muscle and inflammation-related diseases may be the frontiers of future research. Conclusion: Although mitophagy research has flourished and attracted attention from all over the world, the regional imbalance in the development of mitophagy research was observed. Our results provided a comprehensive global research landscape of mitophagy from 2005– 2021 from a perspective of bibliometrics, which may serve as a reference for future mitophagy studies.


INTRODUCTION
As the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondria play essential roles in regulating cellular metabolism and physiology (Harper et al., 2018). Thus, the mitochondrial quality control is important to maintain the life of cells, as well as human health (Pickles et al., 2018). Mitophagy was a recently identified form of selective autophagy, during which dysfunctional or superfluous mitochondria were removed (Gustafsson and Dorn, 2019a). Although mitophagy was described firstly in yeast, it is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that has also been identified in mammals (Priault et al., 2005;Palikaras et al., 2018). So far, at least two distinct pathways have been found to be involved in the mechanisms of mitophagy. One is the PINK1/Parkin pathway, and the other is the mitophagy receptor pathway (Gustafsson et al., 2019b); its functional roles include mitochondrial quality and quantity control, metabolic reprogramming, and differentiation (Palikaras et al., 2018). For more than a decade, significant progress has been made in the field of mitophagy and a list of diseases, such as neurodegenerative disease (Malpartida et al., 2021), cardiovascular disease (Bravo-San Pedro et al., 2017), and cancer (Panigrahi et al., 2020), were found to be closely associated with mitophagy impairment. Recently, several systematic reviews on mitophagy have been performed (Palikaras et al., 2018;Pickles et al., 2018;Onishi et al., 2021). With these reviews, we can understand the mechanism, function, and related diseases of mitophagy. However, the comprehensive knowledge of the global research status, current hotspots, and future trends of mitophagy is still lacking.
Bibliometric analysis is a powerful approach that uses literature metrics or indicators to quantitatively measure the research performance in a certain field (Deng et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2021c). It was coined more than 50 years ago (Pritchard, 1969), and now it has been widely used as a methodology for evaluating trends and frontiers from a large number of publications Hu et al., 2021). Through bibliometric analysis, influential articles, main research fields, and new research directions can be timely and comprehensively achieved by researchers (Thompson and Walker, 2015). Compared with traditional reviews, bibliometric-based analyses can provide a more comprehensive perspective on the research trends, and FIGURE 1 | Flowchart of the methodology and design of this study.
Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences | www.frontiersin.org July 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 851966 2 the data is more objective (Yan et al., 2021). With the development of bibliometrics, dozens of software tools for conducting bibliometric analysis are available for researchers (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020). CiteSpace and VOSviewer represent the two most commonly used tools for visualization (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020). Recently, thousands of bibliometric studies have been conducted in a range of fields (Donthu et al., 2021), while only one study reported on mitophagy so far which focused on comparing the difference in research progress in China and other developed countries . The global research status of mitophagy remains largely unknown.
In this study, a bibliometric-based analysis was performed to systematically evaluate the mitophagy studies from 2005 to 2021. By taking advantage of CiteSpace and VOSviewer, we comprehensively analyzed the publication output, disciplinary composition, countries/regions, institutions, publishers, funders, authors, journals, top-cited articles, references, and appeared keywords. Our results draw a visualization map of the global research landscape of mitophagy, helping researchers, especially for those who are new to this field, to deepen their understanding of the current status and future directions of mitophagy research.

Data Collection and Cleaning
Publications were extracted from the database of the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) in this study. WoSCC is the world's oldest, most widely used, and authoritative database of research publications and citations, which contains records of articles from the highest impact journals worldwide (Birkle et al., 2020). A literature search was performed within 1 day on 30 November 2021. The search formula was set as follows: Mitophagy (Topic) and 2022 (Exclude-Publication Years) and Meeting Abstracts or Editorial Materials or Early Access or Book Chapters or Corrections or Proceedings Papers or Letters or Retracted Publications or News Items or Retractions (Exclude-Document Types). A search by Topic will be searched in the title, abstract, author keywords, and keywords plus. A total of 5846 literatures were obtained and exported for full record and cited references in the format of plain text files. Using Endnote software, a total of two duplications were found. After removing duplications, a total of 5844 unique records remained, including 4434 articles and 1410 reviews ( Figure 1). Research articles published original findings and reviews and are written based on existing articles. Based on these two types of documents, the impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is calculated by Clarivate. Therefore, consistent with other studies Hu et al., 2021;Zhang et al., 2021), we only used articles and reviews for bibliometric analysis in this study.
Of note, we have cleaned the data before analysis (Wang et al., 2021b;Zhang et al., 2021). These included: 1) Publications from Taiwan and the People's Republic of China were reclassified to China; 2) Publications from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales were assigned to the United Kingdom; 3) Publications from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark. Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden were merged into European Union; 4) Publications from Cent S Univ and Cent South Univ merged into Cent South Univ; 5) Publications from Guangdong Med Coll and Guangdong Med Univ merged into Guangdong Med Univ; 6) Publications from Univ Texas Southwestern Med Ctr Dallas and Univ Texas SW Med Ctr Dallas merged into Univ Texas Southwestern Med Ctr Dallas.

Visualized Analysis
CiteSpace software (Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, United States) is a freely available Java application, which was widely used for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in the scientific literature (Chen, 2006). It was designed by Chen (2004) and last updated on 17 January 2021 (Version 5.8. R2). Web of Science is the primary source of input data for CiteSpace. It has been widely used for visualizing bibliometric networks by other studies Ma et al., 2021). In this study, CiteSpace was used to perform a bibliometric analysis of collaborations (countries/regions, institutions, authors), the timeline view of co-occurrence (keywords), and citation bursts (references and keywords). Co-occurrence analysis was used to find the number of terms where they occur together in the same article and weighted by the frequency of occurrence. Citation bursts means that the frequency of a term has soared within a certain short period. The primary parameters were set as follows: time slicing (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021), years per slice (2 years), and selection criteria (g-index, k = 25). Other parameters were set according to the CiteSpace manual for different situations.
VOSviewer software is a useful tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks (Van Eck and Waltman, 2010). It was developed by the Center for Science and Technology Research at Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 2007 (Van Eck and Waltman, 2007). The latest version 1.6.17 was released on 22 July 2021, and is free for download. Co-authorship networks, citation-based networks, and co-occurrence networks can be created based on data downloaded from the Web of Science. It also has been widely used for visualizing bibliometric networks by other groups Xiong et al., 2021). In this study, VOSviewer was used for visualizing the co-authorship between countries/regions, institutions, authors, and the co-occurrence of keywords.
Other information such as impact factor (IF) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) division of journals were obtained from the Web of Science website (www.webofscience.com) directly on 30 November 2021. Microsoft Office Excel 2016 was used to analyze the annual publications. WordArt (https://wordart. com/) was used to create the word cloud of the subject categories. GunnMap 2 (http://gunnmap.herokuapp.com/) was used to display the global publication distribution on a world map.

Analysis of Publication Trends and Subject Categories
From the first article published on 10 June 2005 to 30 November 2021, a total of 5844 publications on mitophagy research were identified. Figure 2A shows the annual number of publications and citations worldwide. In general, the annual number of publications increased year by year. The early stage (2005-2014) saw a relatively stable growth, with a publication count of no more than 300 per year. While a steep growth was observed since 2015. Up to date (30 November 2021), the publication outputs have reached over 1100 in 2021. The number of 2020 (1032) was over 27 times that of 2010 (74). The annual number of citations were also increased yearly, and the number in 2020 (51433) was over 40 times that of 2010 (1281).
By the analysis of CiteSpace, we identified 127 disciplinary categories involved in the field of mitophagy ( Figure 2B). Through WordArt, a map of the word cloud of the subject categories was created (the more publications belong to the The nodes represent countries/regions or institutions (the larger circle, the higher the number of publications); lines between the nodes represent collaboration (the wider lines, the more frequency of collaborations); the purple ring represents active cooperation (centrality≥0.10).
Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences | www.frontiersin.org July 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 851966 6 category, the bigger the word appears in the word cloud). Cell Biology (1916, 32.79%) is the most common category, followed by Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1574, 26.93%), Neurosciences and Neurology (616, 10.54%), Neurosciences (566, 9.69%) and Pharmacology and Pharmacy (437, 7.48%). Figure 3A shows the geographical distribution of global productivity of studies on mitophagy. A total of 76 different countries/regions covering five continents have taken part in mitophagy research. Thirteen countries/regions published only one paper, and 12 countries/regions published over 100 articles. These results indicated that mitophagy research has attracted attention from all over the world. However, research development of mitophagy in different countries/regions is uneven. Among the top 10 most prolific countries or political entities (Table 1), United States had the highest number of publications (2025, 34.65%), followed by China (1968, 33.68%), the European Union (1373, 23.49%), the United Kingdom (418, 7.15%), and Japan (364, 6.23%). These top five countries or political entities account for most of the total publications. From Figure 3B, we can see that the number of annual publications slowly increased after 2015 in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Whereas, a relatively sharp rise was witnessed in China after 2015, especially during the year from 2017 to 2021. Therefore, we can conclude that China has been the main driver of the increase in mitophagy research since 2015. Among the top 10 most prolific institutions, six of them come from China, and the remaining institutions come from the United States (N = 2), the United Kingdom (N = 1), and Canada (N = 1). Chinese Acad Sci (112, 1.92%) is the leading institute, followed by Univ Pittsburgh (109, 1.87%), Univ Calif San Diego (92, 1.57%) and Zhejiang Univ (88, 1.51%). Of note, no institutions from the European Union appeared on the list.

Analysis of Countries and Institutions
Next, network visualization of the co-authorship countries and institutions was analyzed via CiteSpace. In the cooperative network map (Figure 4), the nodes represent countries/ institutions (the larger circle, the higher the number of publications); lines between the nodes represent a collaboration between two countries/institutions on the same article (the wider lines, the more frequency of collaborations); the purple ring represents active cooperation of the country/ institutions (centrality≥0.10). Herein, high centrality indicates active cooperation. From Figure 4 and Table 1, we can see that United States (0.51) and Univ Pittsburgh (0.13) obtained the highest centrality among countries and institutions, respectively. In addition, many other countries or political entities, such as European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, Russia and Norway, also had a high centrality (purple ring). However, China and Japan do not have a high centrality, indicating their insufficient international cooperation.

Analysis of Authors and Co-cited Authors
A total of 27872 authors published literature on mitophagy (data not shown). Among the top 10 prolific authors ( Table 2), Jun Ren published the largest number of papers (N = 38), followed by Richard J Youle (N = 37), Roberta A Gottlieb (N = 34), and Asa B Gustafsson (N = 33). In the cooperative network map ( Figure 5A), the 114 authors who published at least 10 papers and had co-authorship with others were visualized. A total of 114 terms, 12 clusters, 280 links, and a total link strength of 1106 were generated. Each node represented an author. The size of the nodes is determined by the number of publications (The higher the number, the larger the node). The same color represented the same cluster. The line between the nodes represented the co-authorship between authors (The stronger the cooperation relationship, the wider the line). The number of total link strengths reflected the total co-authorship strength between authors. Co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together by another or more articles at the same time, providing a way to study the specialty structure of science (Wang et al., 2021b). In this study, a total of 106127 co-cited authors were identified (data not shown). Among the top 10 most frequently co-cited authors ( Table 2), Derek P Narendra (2693 times) ranked first, followed by Noboru Mizushima (1446 times) and Richard J Youle (1313 times). It is worth noting that Richard J Youle, Hao Zhou, and Daniel J Klionsky were the top 10 authors ranked by both numbers of publication and co-citation frequency.

Analysis of Journals and Co-Cited Journals
A total of 1021 academic journals had published articles on mitophagy (data not shown). The top 10 journals published with the highest number of publications were shown in Table 3. Among them, Autophagy (N = 208) most productive one and had the highest IF 2020 (16.016). Eight (80%) of the journals had an IF 2020 over 5 and 6 (60%) were located in JCR Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences | www.frontiersin.org July 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 851966 8 (2020) Q1 region. A density map of the top 56 productive journals (with over 20 publications) was shown in Figure 5B. The top 10 journals ranked by co-cited frequency were also shown in Table 3. We can see that the journal with the highest co-citations was Journal of Biological Chemistry (co-citation: 17226). Notably, Autophagy, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and PLoS One were the top 10 journals ranked both by a number of publications and co-cited frequency.
What are the publication patterns for mitophagy studies in general journals? In this study, we found that most articles on mitophagy were published in a cell or molecular biology journals (Table 3). Unexpectedly, the Journal of Biological Chemistry was the most frequently co-cited journal (co-citation: 17226) with the IF 2020 as 5.157 that far exceeded some high-impact journals, such as Nature (co-citation: 13427; IF 2020: 49.962), Cell (cocitation: 9829; IF 2020: 41.584), and Science (co-citation: 8462; IF 2020: 47.728). Also notably, Autophagy (IF 2020: 16.016), Journal of Biological Chemistry (IF 2020: 5.157), and PLoS One (IF 2020: 3.24) were the top 10 both productive and cited journals. These results provided some guidance to future authors deciding where to publish their work on mitophagy research.

Analysis of Publishers and Funders
According to the published time, we divided the 5844 papers into two groups. There were 644 papers that were published during 2005-2013; and 5200 papers that were published during 2014-2021. Then the publishers and funders of each group were analyzed separately to show the trends over time. The top 10 publishers and funders of each group were presented in Figure 6. During 2005-2013, Elsevier (20.50%), Springer Nature (12.58%), Taylor and Francis (11.02%), Wiley (7.45%), and Public Library Science (5.75%) were the top five largest publishers in the field of mitophagy ( Figure 6A). During 2014-2021, there was a huge increase in the number of publications on Mdpi (7.93%) and Frontiers Media Sa (6.71%), which ranked fourth and fifth, respectively ( Figure 6B). It is noteworthy that Elsevier (25.01%) and Springer Nature (14.56%) were always the top two publishers in the two time periods.

Top Cited Publications and Co-Cited References
The top-cited publications and co-cited references were fundamental and the basis of a certain field. In this study, the 10 most cited publications on mitophagy are listed in Table 4. All the top 10 publications were cited more than 900 times. The article (entitled A role for mitochondria in NLRP3 inflammasome activation) published in 2011 by Rongbin Zhou et al. obtained the largest number of citations (2,876). Of those, seven are articles (70%) and the rest are reviews (30%). As we can see from Table 4, all the top 10 most cited publications were published in highimpact journals before 2015. There were six papers with main themes on the functional roles of PINK1/Parkin and its related pathways in mitophagy. We suggested further reading these articles, if you wanted to get an in-depth knowledge of this field. Next, we constructed a cluster analysis for all the co-cited references by CiteSpace software and presented the clusters in form of a timeline view in Figure 7A. Total 14 clusters were formed: #0 mitochondrial dynamics; #1 mitochondrial quality control; #2 Parkinson's disease; #3 signaling pathway; #4 selective autophagy; #5 mitochondrial fission; #6 neurodegenerative disease; #7 mitochondrial dysfunction; #8 heart failure; #9 skeletal muscle; #10 parkin-mediated mitophagy; #11 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; #12 pathophysiological role; #13 colorectal cancer stress response. Among them, "parkin-mediated mitophagy" was the most recent cluster. In addition, the top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts were identified by Citespace analysis ( Figure 7B). Citation bursts represent a rapid rise in citations within a certain period, which can help characterize the dynamics of a research field (Amjad et al., 2022). In this study, the first burst of reference began in 2008. Among these 25 references, four references (28%) had a burst duration until 2021. The reference with the strongest burstiness (strength = 140.19) was published in Nature Cell Biology by Geisler S et al., in 2010.

Analysis of Keywords
To investigate the research hotspots in the field of mitophagy, a total of 7506 keywords (author keywords) were extracted from the 5844 publications for co-occurrence analysis on VOSviewer and Citespace software. Table 5 shows the top 30 high-frequency keywords. Among these keywords, "mitophagy" (2333 times) was the most frequently appeared one, followed by "mitochondria" (1242 times), "autophagy" (1185 timesand), "apoptosis"   Figure 8A and Table 6). Herein, the serial numbers are sorted by cluster size, and the clusters indicated that publications are grouped into different topics according to the keywords.
To further visualize the research frontiers in the field of mitophagy, the keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed on VOSviewer. In the overlay visualization map ( Figure 8B), different colors of author keywords were marked according to the average publication years. For example, the keywords of "yeast', "ubiquitin", "park2", "fusion", "fission", "autophagy", and "Parkinson's disease/Parkinson disease" were marked in blue, indicating that they were mainly found in the early years. While keywords such as Summarize the basic mechanisms of mitophagy and the crosstalk between autophagy, redox signaling, and mitochondrial dysfunction highlighting its impact on chronic pathologies, particularly on neurodegenerative diseases PNAS, Proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the United States of America.
Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences | www.frontiersin.org July 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 851966 "inflammation," " Alzheimer's d i s e a s e , " "neuroinflammation", "mitochondrial quality control", "neurodegenerative disease", "acute kidney injury", skeletal muscle", "exercise", "drp1", and "melatonin" marked in yellow or red, indicating that these keywords were represented the recent major topics in the field of mitophagy and may also become the frontiers in the future.

DISCUSSION
Nowadays, more and more research are being done around the world, and more and more scientific discoveries are being made. The biggest challenge is how to keep up with the remarkable explosion of knowledge in some active fields such as mitophagy. In this study, we took advantage of bibliometric analysis to Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences | www.frontiersin.org July 2022 | Volume 9 | Article 851966 12 visualize the global research landscape of mitophagy from 2005 to 2021. A total of 5844 articles were identified. Mitophagy research has flourished and attracted attention from all over the world, especially in United States, China, and the European Union. We found a list of outstanding institutions, researchers, journals, publishers, and funders which made a significant contributions to it. Research trends and hotspots were summarized and frontiers were predicted. Our findings provide a historical prospect and new insights into mitophagy.

Trend in Countries/Regions
Although the annual number of publications on mitophagy research increased year by year, a regional imbalance in the development of mitophagy research was observed in this study ( Figure 2B). With no doubt, United States, China, and the European Union were on the dominant position in the field of mitophagy ( Figure 2B, Figure 4A, and Table 1). This could be partially explained by a large number of researchers and institutions and substantial fundings in them (Table 1 and Figure 6C). Previous studies suggested that economic progress and interregional cooperation are two important factors for promoting the development of research in a certain field (Wagner et al., 2018;Mormina, 2019). According to the GDP (https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038130), our data showed that high-income countries were more productive than low-income countries. This was consistent with other bibliometric studies conducted on mitophagy  and other topics, such as ferroptosis in cancer (Li et al., 2022), ATAC-seq , intestinal microbiota in obesity (Yao et al., 2018), COVID-19 (Tantengco, 2021), and Viral Hepatitis (Ornos and Tantengco, 2022). Of note, although China and United States have a roughly equal number of publications, the degree of centrality was much lower in China (0.21) than that in United States (0.51). This indicated that United States put more emphasis on international cooperation, while China was more likely to conduct studies through national collaborative research.

Knowledge Base and Landmarks
The knowledge base is the collection of co-cited references within the corresponding research community and the most cited articles are usually regarded as the landmarks Zhang et al., 2021). In this bibliometric analysis of mitophagy, the top-cited articles and co-cited references were identified and reviewed as follows.
In 2005, the term mitophagy was firstly coined (Lemasters, 2005;Priault et al., 2005) for selective autophagy of mitochondria. In the early years, studies in yeast led to the discovery of several key proteins involved in mitophagy, such as Uth1p (Kissová et al., 2004), Aup1p (Tal et al., 2007), Mdm38 (Nowikovsky et al., 2007) and Atg32 (Kanki et al., 2009;Okamoto et al., 2009). In 2008, Derek demonstrated the role of Parkin protein in mediating the engulfment of mitochondria by autophagosomes and their subsequent degradation in mammalian cells (Narendra et al., 2008). And then, in 2010, four outstanding studies revealed the molecule mechanism of PINK1/Parkin-mediated mitophagy and its pathogenic mechanisms in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease (Geisler et al., 2010;Matsuda et al., 2010;Narendra et al., 2010;Vives-Bauza et al., 2010). Hence, the functional links between PINK1 and Parkin as a classical mitophagy pathway were convincingly demonstrated. From then on, the role of mitophagy was massively studied and mitochondria were considered a promising therapeutical target for Parkinson's disease (Malpartida et al., 2021). In that year, Ivana also identified the mitochondrial protein Nix (also known as BNIP3L) as a selective autophagy receptor in mammalian cells (Novak et al., 2010) and Atsushi Tanaka et al established the essential role of p97 in Parkin-mediated ubiquitination of mitofusins during mitophagy (Novak et al., 2010). These breakthroughs led to the mechanisms of mitophagy being initially established (Youle and Narendra, 2011). After that, other mechanisms such as AMPK-mediated phosphorylation of ULK1 (Egan et al., 2011), hypoxia-induced dephosphorylation of FUNDC1 , PINK1dependent phosphorylation of ubiquitin (Koyano et al., 2014;Lazarou et al., 2015) were successively uncovered. In addition to the historic discovery of the functional links between mitophagy/autophagy and NLRP3 inflammasome activation (Zhou et al., 2011), these findings offer new insights into the mechanisms of mitophagy (Lee et al., 2012;Pickrell and Youle, 2015;Palikaras et al., 2018). In parallel, broader roles of mitophagy in other different diseases have attracted more and more attention after 2010 ( Figure 7A).

Most Prolific and Influential Scientists
Top productive authors and top co-cited authors are the leading scientists in their respective fields. In this study, we found three scholars who were not only the top 10 productive authors but also the top 10 co-cited authors, namely Richard J. Youle, Hao Zhou, and Daniel J. Klionsky (Table 1). This implied their notable contributions to the field of mitophagy. Why can they be both prolific and influential? By further reading their publications, we can understand that Richard J. Youle mainly focused on the mechanisms of mitophagy (Youle and Narendra, 2011) and the roles of PINK1, Parkin, and mitochondrial fidelity in Parkinson's Disease (Pickrell and Youle, 2015); Hao Zhou mainly focused on the role of mitophagy in cardiovascular disease, especially in cardiac microvascular ischemia/reperfusion injury (Zhou et al., 2018;Wang et al., 2020); Daniel J. Klionsky mainly focused on the selective mechanism during mitophagy (Kanki et al., 2009;Wang and Klionsky, 2011;Gatica et al., 2018). Their research directions were well matched with the research hotspots and frontiers of mitophagy. This may be one of the reasons why they can be the most important players in the research field of mitophagy.

CONCLUSION
The present study was hardly not without limitations. First, this study queried only the WoSCC database. High-quality articles published in journals that are not included in the WoSCC database may be missed. The combination of Web of Science with other databases, such as PubMed, Google scholar, Dimensions, and Scopus, would enable a more robust bibliometric analysis. Second, this study also comes with certain limitations inherent in CiteSpace and VOSviewer software. For instance, some keywords in the articles may be not included in the analysis due to the incomplete keyword extraction methods and the clustering analysis based on only the main information (not the full text). Third, although we have standardized some terms that have different expression types, bias may still exist if other synonyms were available.
In summary, by bibliometric analysis of 5844 publications over the previous 17 years, we found that mitophagy research has flourished and attracted attention from all over the world, especially in the United States (2025, 34.65%) and China (1968, 33.68%). A list of outstanding institutions and scholars made a significant contribution, such as Chinese Acad Sci (112, 1.92%), Univ Pittsburgh (109, 1.87%), Richard J. Youle (N = 38), and Derek P. Narendra (co-citation: 2693). Many journals played an important role in promoting the development of mitophagy research, such as Autophagy (N = 208) and Journal of Biological Chemistry (co-citation: 17226). We summarized current research hotspots ("mechanism of mitochondrial quality control", "molecule and signaling pathway in mitophagy", and "mitophagy related diseases") and predicted future frontiers ("parkin-mediated mitophagy" and its roles in "skeletal muscle" and "inflammation-related diseases"). This information will provide researchers with references for future mitophagy studies.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
GL and TX conceived the study. GL and WY collected the data. TX and HY re-examined the data. GL and TX analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. WY, YY, YC, YL, and WZ reviewed and revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.  . The funders had no role in the conduct of the study, the analysis or interpretation of data, and the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.