2.3.1. Basic Bibliometric Analysis Method

The basic bibliometric analysis method used a range of indicators to identify distributed characteristics and structural patterns of the general bibliographic data for MPs ongoing work. For example, the year-wise distribution of research output demonstrated the developing trend of increasing work in the MPs discipline. The contribution of an individual country/academic researcher in the MPs scientific research field was ranked by how many times their publication was cited by others (non-self-citation, NSC), and other data recorded included their total number of publications (TNP), sum of times cited (STC), non-self-citation ratio (NSCR), number of publications cited by more than 100 and 50 times, and number of ESI highly cited publications. Preferred journals were identified as those that delivered academic articles and contributed to the development of the research field [29]. Both the journal impact factor (IF) and quartiles in relevant categories were derived from Journal Citation Report (JCR) 2018, and used to explore the publishing journal's influence in the MPs field and their interdisciplinary research areas. All bibliographic data were analyzed using Microsoft Excel 2016, and figures were created using GraphPad Prism (version 7.04, GraphPad Software Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) and VOSviewer software (version 1.6.9, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands). We used the results of quantitative analysis of the evolution of literature, as well as the bibliometric indicators, to present a general informative overview of MPs research during the study time period.
