**4. Results**

A total of 98,085 unique bibliographic records for the period 1981–2021 on the topic of *E. coli* were retrieved and considered for further processing. We identified 13,408 unique MeSH descriptors, which in turn yielded 54,663 unique combinations with MeSH qualifiers.

In the next sections, we present the descriptive results for each subperiod analyzed. In addition to the strategic chart, we have also included a table with a list of MeSH terms that define a particular research topic, as well as a brief qualitative description of the topics.
