Stem Cell Research Status

Stem cells, the most primitive in the human body, are the original source of human cells and tissues, which are highly self-replicative, proliferative and pluripotent, implying human development, disease, aging and other mysteries. The great potential value to apply stem cell in medicine, biotechnology, fundamental research and so on has aroused great concern between scientists. The research of stem cells has gradually become one of the focus areas in life sciences, as well as the high biomedical research ground in countries. In the “National Outline for Medium and Long Term S&T Development(2006-2020)”, it also clearly states that as one of five biotechnologies, stem cell has become the focus in the cutting-edge technology in the following 15 years. To clearify research status and future trends of stem cell research, it takes the SCI research result of stem cells as the object to do quantitative research in development of stem cells study, so as to grasp the development of stem cell research in China and see the development speed and trend in the correct view, in order to provide valuable quantified information for researchers and relative policy makers.In this paper, it takes SCI, the Science Citation Index database in the WOS platform as the source data, “stem cell” as the theme of the search term, “Peoples R China” as the address key words to search literatures in the stem cell field between 2000 and 2013, integrate them to build the database. It uses Citespace, Bibexcel and Pajek and a variety of other technologies and scientific measurement methods for discussion and it mainly makes quantitative analysis and knowledge mapping indicators show in number, citation, subject distribution and scientific cooperation.The results showed that between 2000 and 2013 the number of SCI research literatures grows rapidly, showing a quadratic curve for curve fitting. In the keywords of high frequency such as EXPRESSION, DIFFERENTIATION, STEM-CELLS, TRANSPLANTATION and IN-VITRO, according to data quantization tables and visualization map display, most belongs to hot subjects and focus of the current frontiers of stem cell research. According to the clustering feature, most belongs to life science, including cell biology, molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience and other disciplines categories, in which Cell Biology, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology are the hot ones and further research shows the obvious interdisciplinary characteristics in stem cell research, and the impact of the interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary research increase rapidly. It shows that the scientific cooperation of stem cells is common and the co-authored papers assume 98.3% in total. The scale has expanded each year, and it shows obvious geographical clustering feature in the scientific cooperation network, but the rate of international cooperation as well as a dominant position in international cooperation needs to be improved.