The study, published on 8 October 2026, follows the PRISMA 2020 guidelines for systematic reviews and combines qualitative synthesis with bibliometric mapping, a technique borrowed from information science that treats the research literature itself as data. The authors searched five databases for publications between 2000 and 2025, retrieved records, and after deduplication screened 252 of them. From there, 118 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, and 19 studies were retained for in-depth qualitative synthesis, while the broader corpus informed the bibliometric analysis. Because the work involved no human participants and relied entirely on previously published, peer-reviewed literature, ethics approval was not required, and the review was conducted under the Committee on Publication Ethics principles.

The bibliometric side of the analysis is where the study becomes genuinely revealing about the shape of the field itself. The authors examined annual production trends, identified core sources using Bradford’s zones, a classical library-science method for distinguishing the small set of journals that publish most of the relevant work from the long tail that publishes the rest, and mapped citation structure and keyword co-occurrence. What emerged was a literature concentrated in engineering education outlets and organised around two distinct intellectual axes: disciplinary engineering education scholarship on one side, and gender-focused psychosocial research on the other. In other words, the people who study how engineers are taught and the people who study how gender shapes motivation have largely been publishing in parallel, with limited integration between the two traditions.

That fragmentation matters, because the review’s qualitative synthesis shows that the mechanisms driving women’s persistence cut across both worlds. The authors identify four interacting mechanisms. The first is belonging, which they describe as relational infrastructure. Decades of research, from Vincent Tinto’s foundational models of student departure to contemporary work on counterspaces for women of colour in STEM, converge on the finding that a student’s sense of being recognised as a legitimate member of the engineering community is not a soft, optional nicety. It is load-bearing. When belonging collapses, persistence tends to collapse with it, and the effect is not uniform: studies show that race and gender interact in how belonging influences decisions to major in STEM fields.

The second mechanism is socially situated self-efficacy and engineering identity. Self-efficacy, the belief that one can successfully execute the tasks required of a domain, has long been a staple of motivation research, but the review emphasises its social situatedness. Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, extended by Lent, Brown and Hackett into career and academic choice, treats efficacy beliefs as products of environments, not just of individuals. Studies of undergraduate women in engineering show that stereotypes about who belongs in the field erode both efficacy and identification with engineering itself, and that this erosion predicts lower achievement and weaker persistence intentions. Danish survey and registry data published in 2024 add population-level evidence linking gender, self-efficacy and attrition from STEM programmes.

The third mechanism is what the authors call cumulative expectancy-value-cost dynamics, drawing on the situated expectancy-value theory developed by Jacquelynne Eccles and Allan Wigfield. The logic is deceptively simple: students persist when they expect to succeed, when they value the outcome, and when the perceived costs, in effort, time, emotional strain and foregone alternatives, do not overwhelm the expected value. But the review’s synthesis shows that for women in engineering these three quantities are not gender-neutral. Threatening academic environments depress self-esteem and engagement, make-or-break gateway courses create profiles of expectancy, value and cost that predict who abandons a major, and the costs accumulate over semesters rather than arriving all at once. Persistence decisions, in this framing, are the output of a slow-moving ledger that the environment keeps writing in.

The fourth mechanism is programme design and viability conditions, and it is here that the review makes its most distinctive contribution. Rather than treating curriculum structure, pedagogy and institutional support as background variables, the authors advance a relational-structural framework that positions programme design as an active contributor to persistence outcomes. The evidence they synthesise includes studies of linked-course communities, which a 2025 randomised controlled trial found can increase student success, cooperative learning methodologies, and programmes such as the Rocky Mountain Scholars Program, which was shown to affect social and academic support, retention and success for female undergraduate engineers. The design of a programme, in this view, either builds the relational infrastructure that belonging requires or quietly dismantles it.

The broader context gives these findings urgency. UNESCO’s 2024 report on securing STEM futures for women, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024, and CEPAL’s analysis of educational transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean all document persistent underrepresentation of women in engineering and technology fields, and consulting analyses such as McKinsey’s 2023 diversity report argue that the costs of that underrepresentation extend well beyond fairness into organisational performance. Against that backdrop, the Chilean study, funded by Chile’s Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo through FONDECYT Regular Grant No. 1241537, is notable for grounding its synthesis in a systematic, reproducible search strategy rather than a selective reading of the literature.

What makes the four-mechanism framework compelling is its insistence on interaction. Belonging, self-efficacy, expectancy-value-cost calculations and programme design do not operate in isolation. A student who doubts her efficacy in a gateway course experiences rising psychological cost precisely because her sense of belonging in the programme is fragile, and a programme that structures competitive, high-stakes weed-out courses amplifies all three at once. Conversely, interventions that build relational infrastructure, such as cohort models, linked courses and counterspaces, can simultaneously raise belonging, strengthen identity, lower perceived cost and improve the expectancy side of the ledger. This is why single-lever interventions so often disappoint in evaluation studies: they address one term of a coupled system while leaving the others untouched.

The review also carries a methodological lesson for the research community. The two-axis structure of the literature, with engineering education scholarship and gender-focused psychosocial research running on separate tracks, suggests that the field’s own organisation may be slowing down the integration of insights that students experience as a single, seamless reality. A woman deciding whether to stay in an engineering programme does not distinguish between a psychosocial mechanism and a structural one; she experiences them together, in the same classroom, in the same week. The relational-structural framework proposed by Beroíza-Valenzuela and Véliz is an attempt to give researchers and programme designers a shared map of that experience, one in which the question is no longer simply how to fix individual students, but how to build programmes that make staying the rational, supported and socially sustainable choice for everyone who wants to engineer.

Subject of Research: Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms

Article Title: Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms

Article References: Beroíza-Valenzuela, F., & Véliz, D. (2026). Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01793-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01793-y

Keywords: Gendered, academic, persistence, engineering, education, bibliometric, trends, underlying, mechanisms, scientific research

The dominance of China, with 85 publications, and Italy, with 25, reflects complementary strengths rather than simple redundancy. Chinese groups have historically driven much of the fundamental materials chemistry of layered hydroxides, including refinements in co-precipitation, hydrothermal, and reconstruction methods that control layer charge density, interlayer spacing, and particle size, all of which govern how much antibiotic can be hosted and how quickly it escapes. Italian contributions, by contrast, have been closely associated with the biomedical translation of anionic clays, particularly in antitumoral and anti-inflammatory delivery, and that translational orientation naturally extends to antimicrobial applications where controlled release can reduce dosing frequency and limit the emergence of resistance at infection sites. The concentration of output in journals such as Applied Clay Science, the International Journal of Nanomedicine, and the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules illustrates the interdisciplinary position of the field: it sits at the intersection of clay mineralogy, nanomedicine, and macromolecular therapeutics, and authors must choose venues according to whether the novelty lies in the material synthesis or in the biological outcome.

The keyword co-occurrence findings, in which LDH, sustained release, and drug delivery emerge as central nodes, confirm that the community defines itself around the release kinetics problem rather than around any single antibiotic class. This is consistent with the underlying chemistry. The general formula of these materials, in which divalent and trivalent metal cations form positively charged hydroxide sheets balanced by interlayer anions and water, allows antibiotics bearing carboxylate, phosphate, or other anionic groups to be intercalated electrostatically. Once intercalated, release is governed by a combination of anion exchange with physiological counter-ions, partial dissolution of the layers, and diffusion through the particle periphery. Because the layers dissolve more readily in acidic media, the resulting carriers exhibit pronounced pH sensitivity, a property that is valuable at infected sites and in intracellular compartments such as phagolysosomes, where pH falls below that of blood and can be used to trigger preferential drug liberation. This same alkaline degradation behavior in gastric media, noted in the source literature, is a double-edged characteristic: it complicates oral delivery of acid-labile payloads yet can be exploited for gastric-responsive formulations.

The comparative framing against other carrier families provides useful context for interpreting why LDHs attract sustained attention despite their younger bibliography. Polyvinyl alcohol hydrogels are appreciated for biocompatibility and water processing but suffer from mechanical weakness and excessive hydrophilicity that accelerate burst release. Metal-organic frameworks offer exceptional internal surface area and tunable pore chemistry, yet concerns over long-term structural stability in aqueous biological environments, biodegradation products, and scalable cost remain active research questions. Mesoporous silica materials are the most clinically mature of the three comparators, but their typical pore dimensions constrain the size of molecules that can be loaded efficiently, and pore architecture influences release in ways that are difficult to tune independently. LDHs occupy a distinctive niche among these alternatives because their loading capacity is not limited by rigid pore windows; instead, the interlayer gallery can expand to accommodate bulky anionic species, and the layer charge can be adjusted through the divalent to trivalent cation ratio, giving formulators a direct handle on loading density and exchange kinetics. Their documented high anion exchange capacity, colloidal stability, and low toxicity in the reviewed literature further support this positioning.

The bibliometric emphasis on citation trends and thematic evolution also illuminates how the field has responded to the clinical backdrop of antimicrobial resistance. The 2022 GLASS report cited in the source article documents high resistance rates among common bacterial pathogens, and the parallel slowdown in the discovery of genuinely new antibiotic scaffolds has shifted attention toward maximizing the performance of existing drugs. Sustained-release delivery is one of the few strategies that improves the pharmacodynamic profile of an established antibiotic without requiring new chemistry at the molecular level. By flattening the sharp plasma spikes and troughs characteristic of immediate-release formulations, steady delivery maintains concentrations within the therapeutic window for longer periods, reduces the frequency of subinhibitory exposure that selects for resistant subpopulations, and improves patient adherence through fewer doses. In this sense, the bibliometric growth of LDH antibiotic delivery research can be read as a materials-science response to a pharmacological and epidemiological problem.

The methodological apparatus of the review itself deserves comment, because bibliometric analysis is increasingly used to map emerging biomedical materials fields and its limitations should be understood when interpreting the results. Restricting the corpus to English-language publications indexed in SCI-Expanded and ESCI introduces a selection bias toward established journals and anglophone or internationally publishing groups, which may undercount contributions from regions with strong domestic journals. The exclusion terms applied to remove degradation and adsorption studies, while scientifically justified, may also have removed hybrid papers that examined both adsorption and release. Nevertheless, the use of two complementary tools, VOSviewer for network visualization and the Bibliometrix package in R for descriptive and thematic statistics, strengthens the reliability of the mapping, since agreement between independent platforms on core findings such as country productivity and keyword clusters reduces the likelihood of software-specific artifacts. The reporting of total link strength as a measure of interaction intensity between nodes follows standard practice in science-mapping studies and allows readers to gauge not just the presence of a collaboration or co-occurrence but its relative weight within the network.

The identification of prominent authors, highly cited works, and funding sources within the 217-document corpus serves a practical function for newcomers to the field. Highly cited papers typically cluster around foundational demonstrations of antibiotic intercalation and release profiling, and tracing the citation flow from these works toward more recent publications reveals a thematic migration: early studies emphasized proof of concept for loading and release, while later work increasingly incorporates biological evaluation, including minimum inhibitory concentration assays, biofilm models, and cytocompatibility testing. The three-field plot analysis, which links countries, institutions, and keywords, exposes where interdisciplinary gaps persist, and the review’s framing of these gaps as opportunities for collaboration is consistent with the observation that no single discipline currently owns the problem. Materials chemists can optimize synthesis and interlayer architecture, microbiologists can define clinically relevant resistance and biofilm challenges, pharmacologists can model release and dosing, and toxicologists can establish biocompatibility thresholds, yet the bibliometric evidence suggests these communities have not fully converged.

The connection drawn between LDH drug delivery research and the Sustainable Development Goals reflects a broader trend in which bibliometric studies situate technical fields within global health priorities. Antimicrobial resistance is explicitly recognized in international frameworks as a threat to sustainable development, and delivery technologies that extend the useful life of existing antibiotics contribute to that agenda without demanding new molecular discovery. The emphasis on relevance to Sustainable Development Goals in the keyword and funding analysis indicates that funding agencies and journals increasingly reward work framed in these terms, which may in turn shape the direction of future publications toward applications with clear health-system relevance, such as wound dressings, implant coatings, and oral formulations for persistent infections.

Looking forward, the bibliometric evidence points toward several strategic directions that follow logically from the identified themes. First, the prominence of sustained release as a keyword suggests that quantitative release modeling, rather than qualitative demonstration, will be the differentiating contribution in coming years, since regulatory translation requires reproducible kinetics under physiologically relevant conditions. Second, the presence of gene therapy, biosensing, and ocular applications in the broader LDH literature signals that antimicrobial researchers may borrow formulation strategies from these adjacent domains, for example exploiting the positive surface charge that prolongs corneal residence to design mucoadhesive antimicrobial films. Third, the geographic concentration of output in two countries implies substantial untapped collaborative capacity, particularly in regions with high antimicrobial resistance burden but lower publication visibility in the indexed corpus, and international partnerships could align material development with the clinical epidemiology of resistance. Finally, the absence of prior bibliometric treatment of this field, which the review establishes as its central novelty, means that the 2025 dataset will serve as a baseline against which future updates can measure whether the field grows in volume, diversifies in geography, or shifts thematically from synthesis-oriented to clinically validated studies, and such longitudinal comparison is precisely the kind of insight that systematic bibliometric monitoring is designed to provide.

Subject of Research: Layered double hydroxides in sustained antibiotic delivery: a bibliometric review

Article Title: Layered double hydroxides in sustained antibiotic delivery: a bibliometric review

Article References: Verma, S. S., Varadavenkatesan, T., Selvaraj, R., & Vinayagam, R. (2026). Layered double hydroxides in sustained antibiotic delivery: a bibliometric review. Journal of Saudi Chemical Society, 30(5), Article 65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44442-026-00120-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44442-026-00120-7

Keywords: Layered, double, hydroxides, sustained, antibiotic, delivery, bibliometric, review, scientific research