Dietary natural products and their potential to influence health and disease including animal model studies

Although biological and pharmacological effects of dietary natural products have been intensively studied, there has been no bibliometric analysis performed on this research field up to now. The current study has aimed to identify and analyze the manuscripts on dietary natural products and their potential to influence health and disease including studies using animal models. Data, including words from titles and abstracts, publication and citation data, have been extracted from Web of Science database and analyzed by the VOSviewer software. Our search has yielded 1,014 manuscripts. The ratio of original articles to reviews was identified to be 1.5:1. Over half of the manuscripts have been published since 2010. The manuscripts have been contributed by 4,301 authors from 1,445 organizations in 76 countries/territories and published in 499 journals. The results from the current study point out that scientific research focusing on the potential of dietary natural products to affect health and disease status (including animal model studies) is expanding, and suggests an increasing significance of this scientific area. With the progressive development and improvement of animal studies, it should be expected that animal models of different human diseases (especially civilization ones) would be an integral part of the research for the evaluation of pharmaceuticals originated from dietary natural products like plants or plant materials. Moreover, natural products can also be fed to animals to improve the quality of animal products, with numerous resulting functional effects.