Óleos essenciais para frango de corte: Uma análise cientométrica

Abstract

Performance enhancing antimicrobials in broiler production are being banned in several countries. Essential oils are positive alternatives because they have antimicrobial, digestion-stimulating, antiviral and antifungal characteristics. Thus, the objective, through scientometric analysis, was to verify the scientific contribution that studies using essential oils brought to the broiler industry. The document analysis took place through the international multidisciplinary databases, Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed. A combination of the keywords, “Oil essential broiler chickens” was used to crawl the articles. The studies were grouped according to the database, year and country of publication, authorship, genres and active principles. Data were tabulated in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA). To illustrate the descriptive characteristics of the collected data, the pre.test package was used, while the patterns of association between authors (collaboration network), plant genera and active principles were performed using the Bibliometrix package, both from Software R version 4.1. The variables analyzed in the experiments were categorized into performance, digestibility, meat yield and quality, morphometric, biochemical, intestinal microbiota and antioxidants. The positive effects significance of the EO use on these variables was analyzed using the chi-square test. The years 2019 to 2021 showed greater investment in scientific studies with OE in broiler chickens production. The countries with the highest number of publications were Iran with 17,6%%, followed by Brazil with 11,5%%, Turkey with 8,2% and China with 7,8%. Researchers from the USA had the largest collaboration network with other countries. Among the evaluated plant genuses, Origanum was the most used with 27,5%. Carvacrol was the most studied active ingredient in articles evaluated with 43% of publications. It was verified (p < 0.05) the morphological, positive proportion of the EO on the variables of the gastrointestinal tract, histomorphometry expression of the intestinal mucosa, gene expression, performance and the intestinal microbiota. The results obtained indicate that, regardless of the active ingredient used, there is a strong tendency for EO use to be associated with the intestinal health of broiler chickens.