The bigger picture: The history of antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance displayed by scientometric data

•Semantic and scientometric analysis of all resistance-related PubMed entries.•Provides fast and global overview of ‘medical need’ and ‘public health importance’.•Provides an estimate on the ‘durability’ of newly introduced antibiotics.•May help to support a foreseeing policy regarding research funding.

Monitoring the rapid global spread of antimicrobial resistance requires an over-regional and fast surveillance tool. Data from major surveillance studies based on aggregated results of selected sentinel laboratories or retrospective strain collections are not available for the whole scientific community and are limited by time and region. Thus, we tested an alternative approach to monitor resistance trends by automated semantic and scientometric analysis of all (>100 000) related PubMed entries. A semantic search was done using ‘Gene Ontology’ and MeSH vocabulary and additional search terms for further data refinement. Data extraction was performed using the semantic search engine ‘GoPubMed’. The timely relationship between introduction of novel β-lactam antibiotic classes into the market and emergence of respective resistance was investigated using nearly 22 300 publications over the last 70 years. Further analysis was done with around 54 000 publications related to ‘infectious diseases’ and an additional 50 000 publications related to ‘antimicrobial resistance’ to estimate current trends in publication interest regarding resistance development since 1940. Scientometric results were compared with data from the major surveillance network EARS-Net. Furthermore, the relationship between micro-organism, year and antibiotic market introduction was investigated for eight key antibiotics using nearly 37 500 publications. Owing to influencing factors such as availability of alternative antibiotics, scientometric analysis correlated only partly with resistance development. However, it provides a fast, reliable and global overview of the clinical and public health importance of a specific resistance including the period of the 1940s–1980s, when resistance surveillance studies were not yet established.