💊 Phage Therapy Literome

📚 2026 Entries

Click any title to reveal links for searching PubMed, Google Scholar, Europe PMC, and Crossref. Entries listed as in press lack final volume/page data at time of compilation. Use the Year Index tab to switch years.

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Search across all 5,654 entries in the Literome. The first search triggers loading of all year files (110 files, ~1.1 MB total compressed); subsequent searches are instant. Results show titles and citations; click any title for database links.

The Challenge of Finding Phage Therapy Literature

Phage therapy has been studied for over a century, but it has never existed as a tightly coherent field with uniform terminology. Anyone who wants to use phages to control bacteria — whether in clinical medicine, veterinary practice, agriculture, aquaculture, or food safety — is potentially doing phage therapy or phage-mediated biocontrol of bacteria. That breadth of participation means the literature is scattered across an unusually wide range of journals and does not always use consistent terminology. As a result, no single database search will capture the complete literature.

An equally important problem is the opposite of missing publications: many papers that use phrases like “phage therapy” or “bacteriophage therapy” in their titles, abstracts, or keywords do not actually belong in a phage therapy bibliography. Demonstrating that a phage can kill bacteria in liquid culture, in a spot test on a lawn, or by forming plaques generally is more akin to phage or phage host-range characterization than specifically to phage therapy. To be included here, a publication instead must describe phage activity that goes beyond simply showing that the phage kills the bacterium or multiple bacteria under straightforward in vitro conditions.

What Qualifies as Phage Therapy or Phage-Mediated Biocontrol

For inclusion in this bibliography, a publication generally must describe the use of phages to reduce or control bacteria in a context beyond simple in vitro killing in broth, spot testing on lawns, or plaque formation. Examples of qualifying contexts include:

• Animal infection models (mice, insects, fish, etc.)
• Clinical or veterinary cases or trials
• Biofilm reduction in structured biofilm systems
• Food safety applications (reduction of pathogens on food or food-contact surfaces)
• Aquaculture or agricultural biocontrol
• Plant disease control
• Phage use in combination with antibiotics, with evaluation beyond simple broth killing
• Phage steering: exploitation of phage resistance to drive bacteria toward phenotypes useful in treatment (e.g., loss of virulence factors or reduced antibiotic resistance)
• Innovative approaches to phage purification, storage, packaging, formulation, or cocktail development with therapeutic or biocontrol relevance
• Reviews, commentaries, and perspectives that meaningfully discuss such applications

Publications describing phage isolation and characterization, including host-range testing, that go no further than broth killing, spot tests, or plaque assays are generally not included, even when authors describe their phage as a potential therapeutic agent.

Primary Approach: PubMed

PubMed is the most reliable starting point for biomedical phage therapy literature, but two separate searches are necessary because authors and indexers use both terms with no consistent preference:

Running both and combining results will capture significantly more than either alone. Note that PubMed does not index all journals, and coverage of older literature and non-US journals is uneven.

For biocontrol applications — aquaculture, food safety, plant disease — additional searches are needed, but be aware that “biocontrol” and “biological control” are broad terms used in fields that have nothing to do with phages. Even restricting to “phage biocontrol” will return noise, and many authors who use phages for biocontrol do not use those terms at all, preferring “control,” “treatment,” “reduction,” or simply describing the application without a category label.

Secondary and Tertiary Approaches

Google Scholar indexes a much wider range of journals than PubMed, including many covering veterinary, agricultural, and aquaculture applications. It is especially useful for older literature and publications from journals not indexed in PubMed. Use the same search terms, and make use of Google Scholar’s “cited by” feature to find work that builds on key papers.

Europe PMC (europepmc.org) is freely available and provides broader coverage than PubMed for European journals and older literature — relevant given that much of the foundational phage therapy research originated in Eastern Europe and the UK.

Crossref (search.crossref.org) is useful for locating DOIs, particularly for journals not well indexed elsewhere. If you have a partial citation to verify or complete, a Crossref title search is often the most reliable option.

Search Beyond the Field Level: Target Organism and Phage Type

Anyone working with a specific bacterial target or phage type should search not only for “phage therapy” broadly, but also for their specific organism or phage. A researcher using T4-like phages against Escherichia coli, for example, should be aware of everything done with T4-like phages against E. coli in therapeutic or biocontrol contexts — regardless of whether those papers use “phage therapy” as a term. The relevant prior work may be indexed under organism names alone. Searching on organism and phage names directly, not just field-level terms, is essential for finding everything relevant to your work.

How Authors Can Help Readers Find Their Work

• If your work involves biocontrol, include “phage” or “bacteriophage” explicitly alongside “biocontrol” or “biological control.” These terms alone do not distinguish phage-based work from the vastly larger biocontrol literature focused on insects, weeds, and fungi.
• Name your target organism and phage type explicitly in the title or abstract. Researchers working on the same organism or phage type need to find your work even if they are not searching on “phage therapy” as a term.
• Name your phages according to established conventions and check whether a proposed name has already been used before publishing. See namecheck.phage.org for guidance on phage naming and to search existing phage names.
• Cite the prior phage therapy literature, including older work. Papers that do not engage with the depth of the existing literature are less useful to readers and less compelling to reviewers who know the field.
• Use preprint servers (bioRxiv, Preprints.org) to make your work findable while it is under review.

The Problem in Practice: Example Searches

The core challenge this bibliography addresses is the mismatch between what database searches return and what actually constitutes phage therapy or biocontrol literature. These live examples illustrate the problem:

• PubMed: “phage therapy” — returns a manageable number of results but misses a large fraction of the literature indexed only under “bacteriophage therapy.”
• PubMed: “bacteriophage therapy” — returns a different, partially overlapping set. Neither search alone is sufficient; both are needed.
• Google Scholar: “phage therapy” OR “bacteriophage therapy” — broader coverage but returns thousands of results, many of which merely mention these terms in passing without describing actual therapy or biocontrol.
• Google Scholar: phage biocontrol — illustrates the chaff problem: many results concern biocontrol of insects, fungi, or weeds using agents other than phages.
• Google Scholar: “biological control” bacteriophage — similarly broad and noisy; many results have nothing to do with phage therapy or phage-mediated biocontrol of bacteria specifically.

Distinguishing genuine phage therapy and biocontrol publications from this noise — and from publications that merely use the terminology without doing the work — is the primary purpose of this bibliography.

About This Bibliography

The term “literome” as applied to the bacteriophage literature was coined by Ryland Young (Texas A&M University). This bibliography represents approximately 30 years of ongoing literature tracking. The complete collection (1915–present, 5,654 entries) is available as a downloadable PDF and via the original Literome archive. For background on the challenges of searching the phage therapy literature, see:

Alves, D.R., and S.T. Abedon. 2017. An online phage therapy bibliography: separating under-indexed wheat from overly indexed chaff. AIMS Microbiology 3(3):525–528. 10.3934/microbiol.2017.3.525

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