JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a major global health challenge, characterized by persistent respiratory symptoms and airflow limitation. The global prevalence of COPD is approximately 10.3%, which has become the world's third leading cause of death. COPD not only greatly affects patients' quality of life but also brings a heavy economic burden to the world's healthcare systems. Biological therapy refers to the treatment of diseases with biological materials or biological response modifiers. Biologic therapies are gaining attention in managing COPD and are becoming a research hotspot.

Objective:

The primary objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric and visualized analysis of research hotspots and trends in biological therapies for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) from 2000 to 2025. Using tools like CiteSpace, VOSviewer, R-Bibliometrix, and Origin, the study aims to: Identify key contributing countries, institutions, authors, and journals. Analyze collaboration networks and research impact. Uncover emerging research themes and future directions through keyword co-occurrence, clustering, and burst detection. Provide a comprehensive overview of the evolving landscape in COPD biological therapy to guide future research and clinical practice. This objective is clearly stated in the Abstract and Introduction sections of the manuscript.

Methods:

This study used the Web of Science Core Collection as the database. Then we used CiteSpace, VOSviewer, R-Bibliometrix, and Origin to visualize research on COPD and biologic therapies. These tools helped identify current research hotspots and predict future trends in the field.

Results:

This study collected 474 publications related to the field from 205 countries and 2,010 institutions. The United States plays a central role in this research field. The University of Groningen has the highest number of publications. The most prolific authors are Cazzola, Mario, and Barnes, Peter J., who have the most citations. The most co-cited journal is the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The hot keywords include "therapy," "asthma," "airway inflammation," "risk," "cancer," "mepolizumab," and "expression," among others.

Conclusions:

This study used visualization analysis to determine potential future research directions, which are as follows: (1) Exploring the pathophysiological roles of novel immune regulatory targets and developing intervention strategies; (2) Pushing for the fusion of interdisciplinary technologies. (3) Combine safety data from multiple centers with long-term follow-up and dynamic efficacy monitoring indicators. Through keyword analysis, current or future research hotspots may involve the link between monoclonal antibodies and COPD. At present, the research on biological therapy for COPD still needs further development to offer patients safer and more cost-effective treatment options.