Trends on Gastrotricha research: a bibliometric analysis

Since the discovery of the first Gastrotricha at the end of the eighteenth century, the study of this taxon has proven to be notoriously difficult due to the fragility of the body and its diminutive size. Consequently, this microinvertebrates group is considered part of the less-known metazoan taxa and its biodiversity knowledge is still far from being understood. To bring light to the past, present, and future understanding of Gastrotricha biodiversity literature, we conducted the first study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluating the global research productivity on this clade by carrying out a bibliographic survey in Web of Science and Scopus databases using bibliometric tools. We found 523 studies published between 1904 and 2022 and detected i) a high prevalence of “new species’’ as a keyword in the literature, indicating the youth of our knowledge on biodiversity of this phylum; ii) the formation of clusters of interacting researchers around well-established veterans’ researchers in Europe; but also, iii) the formation of new research centers training new researchers in recent decades around the world. However, we also found that there are gaps in the accessibility of past literature in the main search tools. We believe that it is time to explore new facets of Gastrotricha research and we hope that our study can provide a guide for future research development to shape more effective policies for biodiversity discovery and conservation initiatives.