Trends in Male Infertility Over the Past 50 Years: Landscape Analysis and the Emerging Role of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhang Yingbo , Wang Jiao , Wu Rongrong , Liu Xingyun , Zong Hui , Lu Junyu , Zhan Chaoying , huang Jiang , shen bairong 
Published: February 2025

Abstract

Background: Infertility is a significant negative factor affecting societal population growth and economic stability, with male infertility being a major cause of infertility. In recent years, with the development and advancement of next-generation sequencing technologies and high-resolution mass spectrometry, the volume of male infertility-related literature in scientific databases such as Scopus and PubMed has rapidly increased, and its topics have undergone complex changes over the past 50 years. Additionally, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has provided new tools for enhancing traditional literature analysis and topic modeling.
Objective:This study aims to investigate the changes and trends in research hotspots on male infertility over the past 50 years. Furthermore, to explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) in decision support systems for the clinical translation of male infertility research, we also evaluated the information enhancement capabilities of LLMs in the context of research hotspots on male infertility.
Methods:Various methods, including bibliometrics, topic modeling, Gemini' and ChatGPT's question-answer approach, were employed to compare male infertility hotspots between real-world and virtual world data. Additionally, the study investigated LLMs's ability to enhance information in summarizing male infertility hotspots.
Conclusions:Under the literature evidence of 14,852 male infertility-related publications (12,884 article-type publications and 1,968 review-type publications), traditional bibliometric analyses such as annual analysis, country analysis, and high-impact author analysis show that countries like the United States, China, and Italy are major publishers in infertility research, with the United States being the leading technical influencer in male infertility research. Subsequently, results from topic modeling analysis have effectively mapped out the research themes in male infertility over the past 50 years, this analysis highlights key subjects such as "the impact of gene expression on male infertility", "the effect of age on sperm parameters", and "pathogenic genes of male infertility", marking them as recent research hotspots. However, this method falls short in clearly presenting the latest hotspots in male infertility research. Lastly, the integration of LLMs information enhancement offers a new dimension in this research. This approach successfully presents the recent hotspots in male infertility, encompassing not only the impact of risk factors like "Environmental Exposures", "Genetics", "Immunological Factors", "Hormonal Imbalances" on sperm count and quality but also highlighting emerging areas such as "Precision Medicine" and "Artificial Intelligence (AI)" in male infertility research. Therefore, combining real-world literature evidence with the capabilities of LLMs is crucial for understanding and mapping future trends in this field.