Fifty Years of Research on Camelids and the Contribution of Genetics and Genomics: A Scientometrics Evaluation

ABSTRACT

The population and importance of camels in human life have improved in recent years. As genetics and genomics are becoming a more comprehensive section of life sciences, studying genetic/genomic aspects of the camelid nutrition, milk production, reproduction, immunity, disease and racing ability has become common in recent years. This study was conducted based on text mining and scientometrics techniques. To employ relevant information from Web of Science (WoS), a search strategy was developed to retrieve the "genetics or genomics” and words/phrases related to "camelids”. The statistical population of this study included 3830 publications over a period of 50 years (1971–2020). A total of 3830 publications were retrieved that included 3269 research articles (85.35% of the publications) and 224 review articles (5.85% of the publications). The most frequent subject groups were "Veterinary Sciences” including 862 publications. In total, articles on camelid genomics were published in 1345 journals. Moreover, 127 countries contributed to these 3830 publications, with the USA being the leading country both in number of publications and international collaboration. During the 1971–2010 time period, the phrases "MERS-CoV” and "coronavirus” did not exist in the literature at all, while in the last decade, with 140 and 63 times (5.36% and 2.41%, respectively), they were the most frequent keywords. In general, the most important topics studied from the perspective of camelid genomics have been population genetics and pathogens and their diagnosis, as well as camelid immunity. Future studies should pay special attention to the specificity of camelid genomics for hosting the coronavirus. Furthermore, the special structure of humoral immunity in camels makes this section attractive in immunogenetics research. © 2023, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Mining, Geology and Petroleum Engineering. All rights reserved.