Paper lists
Nine downloadable reference lists of the bleb literature, from 1856 to 2026, in CSV, BibTeX and RIS: what each contains, how the lists were built and where they fall short.
The literature behind this site is available as nine reference lists to download, filter and import into a reference manager. For copyright reasons we do not host the articles, but researchers who cannot otherwise reach a source can ask us for a copy (About).
Each list comes as a CSV table, a BibTeX file and an RIS file for reference managers such as Zotero, EndNote or Mendeley. The files are release v0.1, built on 27 September 2026 from searches run on 26 and 27 September.
The lists
| List | Papers | What it contains | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bleb papers | 2,428 | Papers that study blebs of living cells or report them in their results, including reviews; two retracted papers are kept, flagged and left out of trend counts | bleb papers (CSV) · bleb papers (BibTeX) · bleb papers (RIS) |
| Amoeboid migration without blebs | 1,086 | Amoeboid movement in which no bleb is reported | amoeboid migration without blebs (CSV) · amoeboid migration without blebs (BibTeX) · amoeboid migration without blebs (RIS) |
| Nuclear blebs | 350 | Blebs of the nuclear envelope, a different structure (see Nuclear blebs) | nuclear blebs (CSV) · nuclear blebs (BibTeX) · nuclear blebs (RIS) |
| Blebbing in dying cells (mechanism) | 433 | How blebs form in dying cells, not blebbing used only as a sign of death | blebbing in dying cells (CSV) · blebbing in dying cells (BibTeX) · blebbing in dying cells (RIS) |
| History 1800–1950 | 677 | Older work on blebs and on amoeboid movement in general | history 1800–1950 (CSV) · history 1800–1950 (BibTeX) · history 1800–1950 (RIS) |
| Background works cited by bleb papers | 165 | Works cited by at least five bleb papers that are not bleb papers themselves | background works (CSV) · background works (BibTeX) · background works (RIS) |
| Borderline: reconstituted and cell-free | 37 | Bleb-like behavior of synthetic or giant vesicles and cell-free systems | reconstituted and cell-free (CSV) · reconstituted and cell-free (BibTeX) · reconstituted and cell-free (RIS) |
| Borderline: lobopodia | 13 | Lobopodia and other pressure-driven protrusions usually described as distinct from blebs | lobopodia (CSV) · lobopodia (BibTeX) · lobopodia (RIS) |
| Borderline: cytokinetic bulges | 4 | Membrane bulges during cell division | cytokinetic bulges (CSV) · cytokinetic bulges (BibTeX) · cytokinetic bulges (RIS) |
For each paper, the CSV files give its list, bibliographic details, identifiers (DOI, PMID, PMCID) and a link, its publication type and whether it is peer reviewed, and for 45 of the 83 preprints in the bleb list the DOI of the published version. Further columns hold a retraction flag, a one-line note, the confidence of the sorting and what it was based on, and a citation count. Our own papers are marked. In the BibTeX and RIS files, each record carries a list tag such as blebology:bleb as a keyword, so that merged lists keep track of where each paper came from.
How the lists were built
We searched Europe PMC and PubMed for “bleb” in its various forms, four historical terms, lobopodia and amoeboid movement, in titles, abstracts and open-access full texts; the Meta-review gives the counts at each step. A language model then sorted each record against a written codebook, and we checked samples of its decisions. The sorting set aside uses of “bleb” outside cell biology, such as glaucoma, lung, skin and bacterial blebs. It also left out exosomes, apoptotic bodies, giant plasma-membrane vesicles and papers that mention blebbing only as a sign of cell death or toxicity, but kept vesicles made by causing cells to bleb. Works from before 1951 came from a separate search of scanned journals, databases and the reference lists of historical sources.
Limits
The lists are wide but not complete. Searches inside articles reached only open-access papers, and the rules that thinned out papers mentioning blebs only in their full text may have lost about one relevant paper in ten, a rough estimate from ten test papers. A check of the works cited by at least five bleb papers recovered several important ones, but less-cited works may still be missing, and some papers from the 1960s to the 1990s without bleb words in their title or abstract had to be added by hand.
The history list was sorted from titles alone and reaches books and journals outside the databases only through reference lists. The amoeboid list, found mainly through the word “amoeboid” in titles and abstracts, is a narrow companion to the bleb list rather than a map of amoeboid research. Automated sorting has an expected error of about 5%, and borderline decisions lean toward inclusion.
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