The Current Situation and Future Trends of Ergothioneine in Biology and Medical Research: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Ergothioneine (EGT) is a natural antioxidant with multiple cellular protective properties. Recently, due to the improvement of production efficiency, EGT-related products have been more widely used. This paper studies the present situation of global research trends and hotspots of EGT to better grasp the direction of EGT research in biology and medical. We searched for relevant literature on EGT in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) and SciFinder databases on August 16, 2025. CiteSpace, VOSviewer, Tableau Desktop, Microsoft Excel, Bibliometrix program package and Biorender software are used for statistical analysis and visualisation. A total of 800 articles were collected. It is found that the average growth rate of EGT's publications in biology and medicine from 1996 to 2025 was 17.33%. Based on the statistical results by country/region, it is evident that the primary focal areas of research activity within this domain exhibit concentrated distribution across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Among the top ten authors in terms of publication volume, six are from Asia, three are from Poland in Europe, and one is from the United States (USA) in the Americas. The highest H-index ranking author is Halliwell B (169). Based on the keyword visualisation results, the current research hotspots are mainly divided into three clusters: 1) The absorption, distribution, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant biological molecular mechanisms of EGT in vivo. 2) The impact of EGT's antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects on various diseases; 3) The source of EGT, the antioxidant potential of edible fungi in vitro, and its influencing factors. At present, research on EGT in biology and medicine mainly focuses on basic theories, so we believe that clinical trial research will become a hot trend in the future.