NWB2023_Bibliometric analysis of traditional and emerging computational techniques for computer-aided design of TFOs

Research in life science generates massive and complex data which can be extracted and analyzed by different approaches based on ab-initio modelling, heuristic methods, machine learning techniques, or hybrid models. The Covid pandemic boosted the use of oligonucleotides (ONs) as therapeutic agents for vaccine development generating significant advances in the life science sector. This study aims to trace the production of scientific publications about the computer-aided design of ONs with the ability to form triplexes (TFOs) based on publications in the Scopus database from 1980 to 2023 using the software VOSviewer. We found 7653 scientific publications related to the computer-aided design of ONs. The bibliometric analysis only included 6154 original peer-reviewed articles and excluded 1499 publications corresponding to reviews, books, and methods. Peer-reviewed articles were analyzed using the VOSviewer software, which revealed 923 terms with 148106 total links distributed in two clusters i) Target genome sequence and ii) Computational tools. The bibliometric analysis showed that the molecular dynamic simulations (MDS) term had 272 occurrences. VOSviewer visualizations revealed that MDS is a computational technique widely utilized in the computer-aided design of TFOs. Moreover, the visualizations showed on-trend topics in co-occurrence with emerging trending terms such as cancer, gene, transcription, triplex target site, triplex formation, and silico prediction. This co-occurrence indicates that the topics are studied together and can often have strong correlations in the computer-aided design of ONs.