---
title: "Synovial inflammation, immune–stromal crosstalk and synovial fibroblast research in osteoarthritis"
id: "frontiers-in-immunology-15-synovial-inflammation-and-immune-stromal-crosstalk-in-osteoarthritis-related"
canonical_url: "https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/frontiers-in-immunology-15-synovial-inflammation-and-immune-stromal-crosstalk-in-osteoarthritis-related"
content_type: "clinical_feed_article"
specialty: "General"
source_name: "Frontiers in Immunology"
source_url: "https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2026.1898740"
published_at: "2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"
evidence_level: "Journal Feed"
license: "CC-BY-NC-4.0 / Informational Use"
---
# Synovial inflammation, immune–stromal crosstalk and synovial fibroblast research in osteoarthritis
## Provenance & Clinical Metadata
- **Canonical URL:** https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/frontiers-in-immunology-15-synovial-inflammation-and-immune-stromal-crosstalk-in-osteoarthritis-related
- **Specialty:** [General](https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/general.md)
- **Primary Source:** Frontiers in Immunology
- **Source URL:** [Original Journal Publication](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2026.1898740)
- **Published At:** 2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z
- **Evidence Rating:** Journal Feed
## Executive GIST (TL;DR)
- The provided SOURCE BODY contains Frontiers in Immunology website navigation, journal sections, and publisher information but does not include the article text for the bibliometric analysis titled on **synovial inflammation** and **synovial fibroblast** research. - Key article elements such as the abstract, introduction, aims, methods, results, figures, tables, author list, affiliations, funding, and references were not present in the supplied source content. - The page snippet identifies the manuscript type as a SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article but does not supply the review content or bibliometric outputs. - Because the main manuscript text and data are missing, no specific bibliometric findings (publication counts, citation metrics, author or country networks, keyword trends, or topical clusters) can be extracted from the source. - The source included standard Frontiers navigation material (about, sections, submission links) and repeated lists of journal sections but no study-specific methods, timeframe details beyond the title dates, or analytical approaches. - Any statements about study results, methodological details, or bibliometric conclusions would be speculative; therefore this summary reports only the absence of those details in the supplied source content. - Where appropriate, the document notes which sections and data one would expect in a full bibliometric analysis of **osteoarthritis** and immune–stromal interactions—explicitly flagged as not reported in the provided source.
## Clinical Analysis & Structured Key Points
Frontiers | Synovial inflammation and immune-stromal crosstalk in osteoarthritis-related synovial fibroblast research, 2006–2025: a bibliometric analysis SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article Front. Immunol. , 01 October 2026 Sec. Systems Immunology Volume 17 - 2026 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2026.1898740 Published in Frontiers in Immunology Systems Immunology 7 impact factor 11.3 citescore Part of a Research Topic Future Perspectives in Osteoarthritis Research and Treatment 21k views 16 articles Editor & Reviewers Edited by D B Davide Bizzoca Reviewed by S G Stavros Giaglis M N Michael Newton Outline Figures and Tables Figure 1 View in article Figure 2 View in article Figure 3 View in article Figure 4 View in article Figure 5 View in article Figure 6 View in article Figure 7 View in article Figure 8 View in article Table 1 Overall bibliometric characteristics of the WOSCC, Scopus, and merged datasets. View in article Table 2 Output and international collaboration of leading countries/regions. View in article Table 3 Prolific authors and their impact indicators. View in article Table 4 Leading journals and their impact indicators. View in article Table 5 Globally highly cited documents. View in article Table 6 Highly cited documents ranked by local citations. View in article SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article Front. Immunol. , 01 October 2026 Sec. Systems Immunology Volume 17 - 2026 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2026.1898740 Synovial inflammation and immune-stromal crosstalk in osteoarthritis-related synovial fibroblast research, 2006–2025: a bibliometric analysis T X Tiange Xia 1,2 X S Xiaoyan Sun 1,2 Z J Zhiwei Jiang 1,2 Y Z Yijie Zhang 1,2 Y Z Yi Zhou 1,2 Y S Yang Shao 2 * S L Shaoshuo Li 2 * J W Jianwei Wang 2 * 1. Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China 2. Wuxi TCM Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Wuxi, China Article metrics View details Abstract Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is increasingly understood as a whole-joint organ disease involving cartilage, synovium, subchondral bone, and the local immune-stromal microenvironment. Synovial fibroblasts and fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLS) participate in synovitis, matrix remodeling, cartilage-synovium crosstalk, pain-associated microenvironments, and disease heterogeneity. However, the knowledge structure, main knowledge sources, and frontier evolution of OA-related synovial fibroblast research remain incompletely mapped. Methods: We retrieved publications on OA-related synovial fibroblasts/fibroblast-like synoviocytes (OA-FLS) published from 2006 to 2025 from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) and Scopus. After integration and deduplication, Bibliometrix, CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Python were used to analyze annual publication trends, national and institutional contributions, author and journal distributions, collaboration networks, global and local citation structures, keyword co-occurrence, trend topics, and thematic evolution. Results: A total of 1,881 publications were included, comprising 1,642 articles and 239 reviews. Annual output increased from 53 publications in 2006 to 142 in 2025, with an annual growth rate of 5.32%. China contributed the largest number of publications, whereas international collaboration remained relatively limited. Keyword and citation structures indicated a strong influence of RA-FLS-related knowledge sources. Recent hotspots increasingly involved synovitis, immune-stromal interaction, extracellular vesicle-mediated communication, fibrosis, pain-associated fibroblast states, and single-cell/spatially related studies. Conclusion: OA-FLS research has expanded from early studies of inflammatory mediators and catabolic pathways toward questions about fibroblast states, tissue location, immune-stromal interaction, and clinical phenotype association. These findings suggest a gradual movement from RA-derived conceptual borrowing toward more OA-contextualized interpretation, although this pattern should be understood as a bibliometric inference rather than direct mechanistic proof. Future studies need to clarify which OA-FLS states have stable, reproducible, and pathologically meaningful disease associations through standardized sampling, multicenter validation, spatial localization, functional experiments, and integration with clinical phenotypes. Introduction Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common chronic joint diseases and is mainly characterized by joint pain, functional limitation, and structural damage ( 1 , 2 ). Traditionally, OA was regarded as a degenerative disease centered on cartilage degeneration and “wear and tear,” but this framework does not adequately explain its clinical heterogeneity: pain, synovitis, imaging-defined structural damage, and treatment response often do not show a linear correspondence ( 1 , 3 , 4 ). In recent years, OA has increasingly been redefined as a whole-joint organ disease involving the synovium, cartilage, subchondral bone, and periarticular tissues. Mechanical, inflammatory, and immune-stromal interactions among these tissues jointly contribute to disease onset and progression ( 1 , 3 , 4 ). Within this conceptual shift, the importance of the synovium and its cellular composition has been reassessed. Synovitis can be observed at different stages of OA and is associated with pain, joint swelling, and progression of cartilage damage ( 5 , 6 ). Synovial fibroblasts in the synovial lining and sublining layers contribute to tissue homeostasis and can respond to inflammatory mediators, mechanical stimulation, metabolic abnormalities, and damage-associated signals, thereby regulating cytokine and chemokine secretion, matrix degradation and remodeling, cartilage-synovium crosstalk, and fibrotic changes ( 6 – 8 ). In this article, OA-related synovial fibroblasts and fibroblast-like synoviocytes are collectively referred to as OA-FLS. After this definition, OA-FLS is used as the collective term for OA-related synovial fibroblasts/fibroblast-like synoviocytes, whereas FLS is used as the abbreviation for fibroblast-like synoviocytes where appropriate. Existing studies suggest that OA-FLS are not merely structural support cells but active cell populations involved in persistent synovitis, pain-associated states, local microenvironmental shaping, and tissue remodeling ( 7 – 9 ). However, OA-FLS research did not develop within a fully independent knowledge system. The rheumatoid arthritis (RA) field developed a relatively mature RA-FLS research framework earlier, covering fibroblast activation, migration and invasion-like phenotypes, perpetuation of inflammation, Toll-like receptor-related inflammatory signaling, non-coding RNA regulation, and functional subset definition ( 10 – 14 ). These studies have provided conceptual resources and methodological references for OA-FLS research, but they also raise a question that needs clarification: to what extent has OA-FLS research borrowed the conceptual language and technical paths of RA-FLS research, and where has it gradually formed an interpretation aligned with the pathological features of OA itself ( 7 , 13 , 14 )? This issue is not simply a matter of terminology. The core pathology of RA is autoimmune chronic erosive synovitis, whereas OA more often occurs in the context of aging, mechanical loading, metabolic abnormalities, joint injury, low-grade inflammation, and chronic tissue remodeling ( 4 , 15 ). Therefore, even when the two diseases share certain molecular pathways, cellular markers, or phenotypic terms, they may differ substantially in triggering conditions, tissue localization, and clinical meaning ( 9 , 13 , 14 , 16 ). OA-FLS should be understood within the tissue ecology and clinical heterogeneity of OA itself, rather than being treated as a direct extension of the RA-FLS framework. In recent years, OA-FLS-related studies have continued to increase. The field has expanded from traditional synovitis and inflammatory mediators to non-coding RNA, epigenetic regulation, extracellular vesicle-mediated cartilage-synovium crosstalk, metabolic and mechanical signaling, fibrosis, and single-cell-level heterogeneity analysis ( 7 – 9 , 11 , 17 , 18 ). Narrative reviews can summarize selected mechanistic advances, but they are less able to systematically delineate the macro-level knowledge structure of the field, including the major contributing countries, institutions, authors, and journals; the knowledge base and disciplinary sources; the research shifts reflected by keyword and citation networks; and whether the collaboration landscape can support comparisons and validation across cohorts, platforms, and disease stages ( 19 – 21 ). Although bibliometric approaches have been applied to broader OA synovium-related topics ( 22 ), OA-FLS research has not, to our knowledge, been specifically mapped as a distinct knowledge domain. Therefore, the present study differs by focusing on OA-FLS as the core search and interpretation unit, integrating WOSCC and Scopus records, and examining how this field has been shaped by RA-FLS-derived knowledge while developing more OA-contextualized research themes. Bibliometric analysis offers a suitable broad perspective for addressing these questions because it can simultaneously examine publication output, collaboration patterns, citation structures, and thematic evolution ( 19 – 21 ). Accordingly, this study integrated OA-FLS-related publications from 2006 to 2025 in the WOSCC and Scopus databases and systematically analyzed global output trends, collaboration networks, core authors and journals, citation structures, keyword hotspots, and thematic evolution. We aimed to clarify how OA-FLS research has developed, where its main knowledge sources lie, and which directions may require more standardized samples, cross-cohort validation, and clinical phenotype linkage. Materials and methods Data sources and data processing Bibliographic records included in this study were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) and Scopus databases to enhance the comprehensiveness and robustness of the analysis. The retrieval period covered publications from January 1, 2006, to December 31, 2025. Only English-language publications were included, and document types were restricted to Articles and Reviews. All searches and data exports were completed on May 2, 2026, to reduce record discrepancies caused by ongoing database updates. The search strategy was constructed using Boolean logic to capture studies related to osteoarthritis and synovial fibroblasts as comprehensively as possible. The specific search formulas were as follows: TS=((“osteoarthrit*” OR “osteoarthros*” OR “degenerative joint disease*” OR “degenerative arthritis”) AND (“synovial fibroblast*” OR “fibroblast-like synoviocyte*” OR “fibroblast like synoviocyte*” OR “fibroblast-like synovial cell*” OR “fibroblast like synovial cell*” OR “type B synoviocyte*” OR “type-B synoviocyte*” OR “osteoarthritis synovial fibroblast*” OR “osteoarthritic synovial fibroblast*” OR “osteoarthritis fibroblast-like synoviocyte*” OR “osteoarthritic fibroblast-like synoviocyte*”)) and: TITLE-ABS-KEY((“osteoarthrit*” OR “osteoarthros*” OR “degenerative joint disease*” OR “degenerative arthritis”)) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY((“synovial fibroblast*” OR “fibroblast-like synoviocyte*” OR “fibroblast like synoviocyte*” OR “fibroblast-like synovial cell*” OR “fibroblast like synovial cell*” OR “type B synoviocyte*” OR “type-B synoviocyte*” OR “osteoarthritis synovial fibroblast*” OR “osteoarthritic synovial fibroblast*” OR “osteoarthritis fibroblast-like synoviocyte*” OR “osteoarthritic fibroblast-like synoviocyte*”)) ( Supplementary Table S1 ). The search strategy was intentionally centered on synovial fibroblasts and FLS to preserve thematic specificity. Broader terms such as “stromal cells,” “mesenchymal stromal cells,” and “synovial lining cells” were not included as independent search terms because they may retrieve heterogeneous stromal, mesenchymal, or lining-cell studies that do not specifically address OA-FLS. This choice improved conceptual specificity but may have reduced coverage of studies indexed under broader stromal-cell terminology. The searches initially identified 2,026 WOSCC and 1,809 Scopus records; after eligibility screening, 1,592 and 1,339 records, respectively, remained for integration and deduplication. Data integration and deduplication followed standardized workflows widely adopted in previous bibliometric studies ( 23 , 24 ). Specifically, the Bibliometrix package and custom Python scripts were used to merge datasets and remove duplicate records. Duplicate records were identified through a stepwise procedure. Records with identical DOI or identical normalized titles were first identified automatically. For records without DOI, potential duplicates were then screened by normalized title, first-author name, publication year, and journal information, followed by manual confirmation. Title normalization included conversion to lowercase, removal of punctuation, and trimming of extra spaces. Potential duplicates with inconsistent metadata were inspected manually, with priority given to DOI, complete title, first-author information, journal, and publication-year consistency. PMID was not used as a mandatory matching field because it was not consistently available across WOSCC and Scopus exports. Ultimately, 1,881 unique publications were included in the final analysis, including 1,642 articles and 239 reviews ( Figure 1 ). The complete search strategies for WOSCC and Scopus are provided in Supplementary Table S1 . Titles, abstracts, and keywords of all included publications were integrated into a unified corpus for subsequent analyses. Figure 1 Literature identification, database integration, and deduplication workflow. The image summarizes retrieval, integration, deduplication, and final inclusion of records from WOSCC and Scopus. Before formal analysis, author, institution, country/region, journal, and keyword fields were standardized. Standardization was performed using a combination of automatic cleaning and manual inspection. For author names, obvious spelling variants, initials, capitalization differences, and formatting inconsistencies were checked and harmonized where the identity was clear. For institutions, common name variants and known changes in institutional naming were merged when they clearly referred to the same entity; otherwise, the original database record was retained to avoid overcorrection. Country and region names were standardized according to the exported affiliation fields and manually checked for common variants. Keywords were harmonized by merging obvious singular/plural forms, abbreviation variants, and synonymous expressions where appropriate. Because complete author disambiguation is not possible in bibliometric datasets, potential homonyms and author-name ambiguity were acknowledged as methodological limitations. Bibliometric analysis A multidimensional bibliometric framework was used to systematically characterize the knowledge structure and developmental trajectory of this field. Descriptive bibliometric analyses, including annual publication trends, citation patterns, leading countries, prolific authors, journal distributions, and citation analyses, were performed using the Bibliometrix package (v5.0) in R software (v4.4.5). Because WOSCC and Scopus differ in citation coverage, indexing policies, and metadata structures, citation-related indicators were interpreted descriptively rather than as strictly interchangeable measures. Database-specific descriptive indicators were first summarized separately and then compared with the merged dataset. In the merged analysis, global citation counts, local citation counts, and normalized citation indicators were calculated within the integrated corpus when available. We did not attempt to force equivalence between WOSCC and Scopus citation counts; instead, citation analyses were used to identify broad knowledge sources and internal citation structures. Trend topic analysis was conducted using the Trend Topics function in Bibliometrix. The top 120 high-frequency terms were extracted, and thematic clustering was performed using the Louvain algorithm with a minimum frequency threshold of 5 per thousand publications. Three representative labels were assigned to each thematic cluster. Author and country collaboration networks were also constructed using Bibliometrix, with Louvain clustering, association-strength normalization, and automatic layout optimization. Visualization parameters were set as follows: maximum number of nodes = 50, repulsion parameter = 0.5, minimum edge weight = 1, exclusion of isolated nodes, and retention of authors with more than 20 publications. Keyword clustering analysis was further performed using CiteSpace (v6.2.R1). The time slicing interval was set to one year, and node selection parameters were as follows: g-index (k = 25), LRF = 2.5, L/N = 10, LBY = 5, and e = 1.0. The Minimum Duration for keyword burst and citation burst analyses was set to 2, while the remaining algorithmic parameters, including the state transition rate alpha and weight gamma, were kept at their default settings (alpha = 2.0, gamma = 1.0) ( 25 ). In addition, VOSviewer (v1.6.20) was used to construct author co-citation and journal co-citation networks. The threshold criteria were author co-citation frequency at least 100 and journal co-citation frequency at least 500 ( 26 ). Selected raw outputs generated by the above software were subsequently imported into a Python environment for advanced visualization and network rendering using the pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, and networkx libraries. Results Overall bibliometric characteristics and annual growth trends Between 2006 and 2025, 1,881 OA-FLS-related publications were included after merging WOSCC and Scopus. The WOSCC dataset contained 1,592 publications, and the Scopus dataset contained 1,339 publications; after cross-database deduplication, the final corpus included 500 sources, 92,925 references, 10,164 authors, 2,961 author keywords, and 6,856 Keywords Plus terms. Keywords Plus refers to index terms generated from the titles of cited references. By document type, there were 1,642 articles and 239 reviews; the average number of citations per document was 43.17, and the percentage of international co-authorships was 17.49% ( Figures 1 , 2 ; Table 1 ). Figure 2 Overall bibliometric characteristics and document-type composition of WOSCC, Scopus, and the merged dataset. (A–C) Show the timespan, sources, authors, references, annual growth rate, international co-authorship percentage, and other indicators for the three datasets; the merged WOSCC+Scopus column represents 1,881 records after cross-database deduplication. (D) Shows the proportions of articles and reviews. Table 1 Description WOSCC Scopus WOSCC+Scopus Timespan 2006:2025 2006:2025 2006:2025 Sources (Journals, Books, etc.) 418 388 500 Documents 1592 1339 1881 Annual Growth Rate % 4.99 6.15 5.32 Document Average Age 9.05 8.8 9.07 Average citations per doc 42.7 43.6 43.17 References 55490 139359 92925 Keywords Plus (ID) 3409 9205 6856 Author’s Keywords (DE) 2529 2214 2961 Authors 8776 7048 10164 Authors of single-authored docs 14 7 16 Single-authored docs 17 7 20 Co-Authors per Doc 7.62 8.09 7.69 International co-authorships % 17.15 18.3 17.49 article 1396 1229 1642 review 196 110 239 Overall bibliometric characteristics of the WOSCC, Scopus, and merged datasets. Keywords plus refers to index terms generated from the titles of cited references. Annual publication output showed an overall upward trend. The number of publications increased from 53 in 2006 to 142 in 2025, with an annual growth rate of 5.32%; after 2019, most years had more than 100 publications. Articles consistently accounted for the majority of publications, with 121 articles and 21 revi
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