Stingless Bees (1955–2021) and Other Bees (1945–2021) in Propolis Research. A Bibliometric Review of Scholarly Articles

Bees transform nectar and honeydew into honey, floral pollen into bee pollen, and resins-latex-gums into propolis. Protective functions and biological activities of propolis apply for the bee nest and apitherapy. This chapter deals with the metadata on published propolis research available in Scopus, which started in 1945, and scaled-up to 7886 documents in 2021, indicating that the research on resins collected by corbiculate bees is in the focus of interest nowadays. The yearly production increased exponentially from 2015 up to 38 documents for stingless bees and 685 for other bees in 2021. Vassya Bankova was the most productive propolis researcher in stingless bee (10 documents) and other bee (99 documents). Similarly, the journal Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine was at the top for publication numbers on propolis produced by stingless and other bees. Universidade de São Paulo from Brazil was the most relevant institution for stingless bees and other bees. Universidade Estadual de Campinas ranked second for stingless bees and third for other bees. Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho was second for other bees, with a 100 documents less than the first one. Burapha University from Thailand ranked third for stingless bee propolis research, the IOCCP Bulgarian Academy of Science fourth, and other Asian universities from Indonesia and Malaysia were top ten too. From the bibliometric search, the countries with most publications on stingless bees propolis were Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan; and on other bees Brazil, United States, Turkey, China, and Japan. Dominance of propolis research by countries did not reflect the leading author from Bulgaria. There was a gap between the low quantity of documents produced on propolis research by about 600 species of stingless bees, and the 35 times more publications by other species of bees, mostly Apis mellifera. Taxonomy of Scopus database was useful to visualize with VOSviewer the co-authorship network map, co-occurrence of authors’ keywords, and the productivity in propolis research of stingless bees and other bees until 2021.