Recent Trends in Metabolomics by NMR Spectroscopy

This review is an update of our previous contribution published in Angewandte Chemie in January 2019 and provides a critical analysis of the overall scientific production and key findings from NMR-based metabolomics between January 2018 and April 2025. We developed a strategy (described in the Methodological Approach section) for systematically analyzing the literature that enabled us to identify 5081 studies published during this observation period. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize this large dataset in terms of frequency distribution of certain experimental parameters (e.g., magnetic field, pulse sequences, NMR active nuclei, etc.) and to identify six broad main fields of application: human health, food and nutrition, veterinary, plants, environment and analytical methods. The major one remains human health; in absolute terms, its share is greater than the sum of the other five. Within each field, we focused on a few key topics and, for each of them, we provided a detailed and critical analysis of the three articles that have received the largest number of citations per year.