Mapping biomedical hydrogel microspheres through scientometric and topic modeling analysis of emerging nano-enabled design strategies

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Hydrogel microspheres (HMs) are injectable microscale hydrogel platforms formed from crosslinked polymeric networks, with tunable porosity, stiffness, degradation behavior, surface chemistry, and cargo-loading capacity. Recent advances have expanded HMs beyond conventional controlled-release carriers into multifunctional biomedical platforms incorporating micro/nano-architectural designs, nanocomposite components, and biofunctional interfaces. However, the field-level evolution of biomedical HMs, including emerging nano-enabled design strategies, application landscapes, and validation requirements, remains insufficiently characterized. Here, we analyzed 4,399 English-language publications on biomedical HMs from the Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed between 2000 and 2025. Bibliometric mapping, co-citation analysis, keyword evolution analysis, disease/application-landscape mapping, and latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling were integrated to identify publication growth, collaboration structures, intellectual bases, latent topics, and emerging material trends. The results show that controlled release and drug delivery remain foundational themes, whereas recent attention has increasingly focused on engineered HM platforms incorporating micro/nano-architectural features for wound healing, tissue engineering/cell delivery, bone regeneration, osteoarthritis/cartilage repair, and intervertebral disc degeneration. This study provides a data-driven map linking HM fabrication strategies, emerging micro/nano-architectural design approaches, material properties, biomedical functions, and translational validation requirements. Clinical Trial Number: Not applicable.