Natural-product dereplication was established to reduce repeated isolation of known chemistry, but its practical meaning has broadened as mass spectrometry, molecular networking, public repositories, structure-prediction tools, and specialized databases have become integrated into discovery workflows. This review examines how the intellectual and technological organization of dereplication changed and whether the principal constraint shifted from detecting known compounds toward interpreting and validating increasingly abundant candidate annotations. A bibliometric/scientometric design was combined with evidence-bounded interpretation of peer-reviewed dereplication methods, databases, analytical platforms, and computational resources published through 2024. Bibliographic performance, network, and thematic analyses were specified as the appropriate corpus-level tools, while a verified evidence layer was used to interpret analytical and computational change. Citation or network prominence was not treated as a measure of chemical validity or methodological quality. The mapped literature supports a progression from preprocessing and spectral database search toward feature-aware molecular networking, repository-scale searching, machine-learning-assisted class prediction, in-silico structure annotation, and increasingly interoperable knowledge resources. The central synthesis proposed here is that dereplication has become less constrained by the simple availability of candidate matches and more constrained by annotation confidence, context, interoperability, unknown chemical space, and the distinction between analytical association and structural proof. Dereplication has evolved from a comparatively discrete filtering task into a distributed evidence-integration problem. Scientometric interpretation is useful for reconstructing this transition, but bibliographic prominence cannot establish analytical superiority, causal influence, or structural correctness, and corpus-derived quantitative claims require verified database-level records.
