Bibliometric Analysis of Epididymal Sperm Maturation Over the Past 20 Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The epididymis, as an important male sexual organ, plays a key role in sperm transport, maturation, and storage. In recent years, the quality of male semen has been declining, and the role of the epididymis in the process of sperm maturation has gradually attracted the attention of scholars, and there is no bibliometric analysis in this field. This study aimed to conduct a bibliometric analysis of research trends in the field of epididymal sperm maturation over the past 20 years. Methods: The articles and reviews related to sperm maturation in the epididymis from 2003 to 2022 were searched in the WOS core database. Vosviewers, Citespace, and the bibliometrix R software packages were used for bibliometric analysis. Results: We found 1102 articles published in English between January 2003 and December 2022. The number of publications related to epididymal sperm maturation is slowly fluctuating and rising. The United States and China are the two countries that have published the most articles in this field, while the United States and Australia are the two countries that have been most active in international cooperation. Newcastle University, Laval University, and McGill University are the main research institutions. Biological of Reproduction is the most popular journal in the field and the most cited journal. Nixon Brett has published the most papers and Sullivan Robert has been cited the most. Through cluster analysis, it was found that the main directions of this research field are androgen receptor, oxidative stress, sperm capacitation, basal cells, gamete biology, sperm development, epigenetics, proteomics, acrosome reaction, and transgenes. Extracellular vesicles, oxidative stress, male infertility, transcriptomics, epigenetics, and epididymal head, body, and tail are emerging and important research hotspots. Conclusion: This paper is the first bibliometric analysis in the field of epididymal sperm maturation. This article will provide the latest research directions and hot spots, which will provide a ref-erence for scholars studying the function of the epididymis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.147 | 0.221 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".