Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Aug 18, 2022)
Date Submitted: Apr 19, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Global research trends on immunotherapy in cancer: a visualization analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cancer immunotherapy has been gradually introduced and has undergone noteworthy developments in recent years. The number of scientific publications has been expanding, and the progression in this field has been rapidly evolving with time.
Objective:
This study aimed to use bibliometric analysis of the published literature on immunotherapy in cancer to illustrate the research trends over the past 20 years and to summarize the hotspots for future studies.
Methods:
A literature search for medical publications on immunotherapy in cancer from 2000 to 2021 was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection on March 1, 2022. Visualization analysis was performed using VOSviewer software (version 1.6.16).
Results:
From 2000 to 2021, a total of 18,778 publications were retrieved. Annual publication output grew rapidly from 366 in 2000 to 3,194 in 2021, with a clear increase in publications in 2017. The USA issued the largest number of publications (n=6,739, 35.89%), with the University of Texas System making the largest contribution (n=802, 4.27%). A total of 976 meaningful topics were identified and further classified into 4 different clusters. The most common research topics included ‘expression’, ‘chemotherapy’, ‘dendritic cells’, ‘pembrolizumab’ and ‘open-label’. Highly identified cancer types included hepatocellular, bladder, breast and lung cancer. A shift in popularity from mechanism research to clinical trials was observed, indicating that clinical application would be the center of attention in the future.
Conclusions:
Attention has been given to the field of cancer immunotherapy, and this trend will continue in the future. This study provides an unbiased visualization analysis on this topic in a scale-efficient manner for further research.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.