Bibliometric review and perspectives on the biological activity of polyoxometalates against resistant bacterial strains.

Research into alternative compounds for the treatment of bacterial infections has intensified in recent years due to the emergence of resistant bacterial strains and the obsolescence of traditional antibiotics. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are metal‑oxygen clusters of high-valent early transition metals that show promising biological activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria, with molybdenum-, tungsten-, and vanadium-containing POMs standing out. While the synthesis and physicochemical characterization of POMs has been studied and gradually understood in recent decades, the scientific community lacks more detailed information about their activity and biological action mechanism, demanding more scientific efforts for this purpose. This bibliometric review seeks to reduce part of this asymmetry by addressing the latest evidence on the antibacterial activity of POMs against different strains. To this end, scientific articles were searched in the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases between 1996 and 2023, using the descriptors "bacteria", "polyoxometalates", and "antibiotic activity", resulting in over 1200 direct and indirect correlations. By focusing the research on case studies, around 60 scientific reports were selected and used in this review. Although the antibacterial activity of POMs is not recent, there has been an increase in speculation about this characteristic over the last decade, especially identified in Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus strains. The different strategies studied to improve dose-response results, as well as the challenges and perspectives in this issue are also within the scope of this review, supporting further research in this area.