Background: The Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) criteria were officially introduced in 2018 with the aim of establishing a standardized global framework for the diagnosis of malnutrition. Synthesizing expert consensus from multiple international organizations, the GLIM criteria proposed a two-step diagnostic model integrating both phenotypic and etiologic components. Although GLIM-related research has expanded rapidly in recent years, a comprehensive bibliometric evaluation remains absent.Methods: Relevant literature published between 2018 and 2024 was retrieved from the Scopus database. Only English-language original research articles and reviews were included. A total of 729 eligible publications were analyzed using VOSviewer (v1.6.10), CiteSpace (v5.8.R3), and the online platform Bioinformatics. The analysis covered various dimensions, including countries, institutions, authors, journals, keywords, and highly cited references.Results: The volume of GLIM-related publications has shown a steady upward trajectory, peaking in 2024. China emerged as the most prolific country, followed by Spain and Japan. The top contributing institutions included Uppsala University, Capital Medical University, and Beijing Shijitan Hospital. Among the most productive authors were Cederholm T, Shi H, and Correia MITD. Clinical Nutrition and Nutrients were identified as the core journals in this field. Keyword analysis revealed that “malnutrition,” “diagnosis,” “sarcopenia,” “cancer,” and “nutritional risk” were pre-dominant themes, while “systematic review,” “protein blood level,” and “gastric cancer” represented emerging areas of interest.Conclusion: This study represents the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research related to the GLIM criteria. It identifies key contributors, collaboration networks, and thematic evolutions in the field, highlighting a transition from the development of diagnostic frameworks to clinical application and individualized nutritional assessment. These findings provide a valuable reference for guiding future research directions in GLIM-related domains.

Background/Objectives: While some dietary indices have been developed to assess diet quality and chronic disease risk, their comparative effectiveness within the same population remains unclear due to methodological limitations in observational studies. This study employs a causal inference framework to compare nine dietary indices for reducing all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, while investigating inflammatory pathways through multiple mediation analysis. Methods: Using dietary data from 33,881 adults (aged ≥ 20 years, median follow-up 92 months), we applied a causal directed acyclic graph to identify the minimum sufficient adjustment set and implemented generalized propensity score matching to address confounding. Robust Cox proportional hazards regression assessed associations between nine dietary indices—Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII), Composite Dietary Antioxidant Index (CDAI), Healthy Eating Index 2015/2020 (HEI-2015/2020), Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), Alternate Mediterranean Diet (aMED), Mediterranean Diet Index (MEDI), and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH/DASHI)—and mortality outcomes. Multiple additive regression trees (MART) algorithm was used for multiple mediation analysis to examine inflammatory markers (PAR, SII, NPR, TyG, LMR, PLR, ELR, CRP) as mechanistic mediators. Results: Among 33,881 participants (mean age 47.07 years, 51.34% women), 4,230 deaths occurred, including 827 cardiovascular deaths. Under the causal inference framework, higher DII scores increased both all-cause (HR: 1.07; 95% CI: 1.02–1.12) and cardiovascular mortality risk (HR: 1.07; 95% CI: 1.04–1.10) by 7%. The aMED demonstrated the strongest protective association, reducing all-cause mortality by 12% (HR: 0.88; 95% CI: 0.80–0.97) and cardiovascular mortality by 11% (HR: 0.89; 95% CI: 0.80–0.98), followed by MEDI with similar magnitude effects. Other healthy dietary indices showed modest 1–3% risk reductions. Multiple mediation analysis revealed that inflammatory markers, particularly neutrophil-to-platelet ratio (NPR) and systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), significantly mediated diet–mortality associations across all indices, with C-reactive protein (CRP) serving as the most frequent mediator. Conclusions: Using causal inference methodology, the Mediterranean dietary pattern (aMED) shows the strongest causal association with reduced mortality risk, with inflammatory pathways serving as key mediating mechanisms. These findings provide robust evidence for prioritizing Mediterranean dietary patterns in public health interventions and clinical practice, while highlighting inflammation as a critical therapeutic target for dietary interventions aimed at reducing mortality risk.