Discussion
NAFLD, liver disease
LIVER DISEASES, DISEASES, LIVER DISEASE
In this study, 1,891 literature related to the NAFLD the gut-liver axis retrieved from the Web of Science core database was analyzed with VOSviewer, CiteSpace and Excel. The number of papers published in this field generally showed an upward trend in the past 20 years, and the average annual co-citations were increasing year by year. Before 2009, there were few studies in this field. After 2009, researchers gradually started to pay attention to the role of the liver gut axis in NAFLD. Especially after 2018, this field has entered a relatively mature stage of development.China, the United States, and Italy are currently main countries doing research related to the gut-liver axis in NAFLD. In the past 20 years, China has published the most articles, while its average citation was only 17.09, suggesting that Chinese researchers should devote more energy to work on high quality articles. The number of publications of the United States is also much higher than that of other countries, and it has advantages in terms of number of papers cited, H-index and TLS, indicating that the United States is more prominent in research of the field. Centrality represents the importance of the node in the network. Among the top 10 institutions in the centrality ranking, 7 institutions are from the United States, two are from France and one is belonged to Belgium, which further explains the leading position of the United States in this research field. The connecting links between nodes represent the intensity of cooperation between countries, and close cooperation between countries is conducive to the further development of the research.Among the top 10 authors with the largest number of publications, Dr. Bernd Schnabl ranked first, followed by Jasmohan S. Bajaj and Ki Tae Suk. Dr. Bernd Schnabl reviewed the connection between the gut-liver axis and liver diseases and pointed out that we could determine the type of liver disease and its possible progression based on microbial changes, provided a new idea for the diagnosis and prognosis of liver-related diseases (Keywords reflect the core theme of the article, rank articles according to the frequency of co-occurrence could facilitate the analysis of the research focus in the field (The burst detection analysis of keywords can represent the research frontiers in the field within a certain period, which could help researchers understand the dynamic changes of the frontiers of disciplines (Cluster analysis of keywords and co-cited references can help researchers better understand the research status in this field (