Mapping scientific dynamics in « Regenerative Medicine » research

Regenerative medicine takes an increasingly important place in medical research. However, it is a heterogeneous research domain bringing together different scientific fields. The aim of this study is to characterize the history of this concept, the scope of this new research field, and its current trend using a scientometric approach. Literature search was conducted both in PubMed & Scopus databases. Then, we led a descriptive statistics and a network analysis on the corpus (11203 documents). Thus, we have been able to draw a landscape of the «regenerative medicine» field, track its history, examine its trends, rank the actors (author, institution, country, journal) and determine the patterns of scientific collaboration in order to gain an understanding of the diffusion of ideas and the institutionalization of this new field. If the term ‘‘regenerative medicine'' is connoted for the first time in 1992, it began to spread in scientific publication since 2000, with a marked acceleration in the last 5 years. An analysis of the underlying concepts shows a very heterogeneous and unstable research domain with in/out scientific fields along the years. This is accompanied by a lack of autonomy revealed by the absence of leading journal, and calls into question an accomplished legitimation of this new field. Indeed, to sustain its institutionalization, numerous universities had undertaken a communication strategy by entitling their department regenerative medicine. We will discuss our results in the light of the various research public policies in the world and from a science studies point of view.