Argentina: a meta-analysis of the research agenda in cancer and socio-environmental health

Abstract

The economic agenda and corporate interests can influence and/or drive the public biomedical research agenda, establishing priorities in the study topics. In this work, we analyzed the contents of the cancer research agenda in Argentina, including a comprehensive analysis of the different epistemological dimensions associated with the study of this set of pathologies.Methods: A bibliometric analysis was conducted based on 7319 scientific articles published between 1980 and 2023, divided into two periods (1980-2000 and 2001-2023), containing one or more authors with Argentina as their affiliation country. The PubMed database and the CorText platform were used to work with the database and to extract the most frequent multi-terms. Through this extraction, the main categories linked to cancer research, their preponderance in the local research agenda, and the place occupied by approaches linked to the molecular, social, and environmental determinants of cancer could be visualized. The content of this cancer research agenda was represented through co-occurrence networks of the predominant multi-terms found in the articles' titles, keywords, and abstracts.Results: The results reflected a strong predominance of methodological approaches associated with molecular and cellular biology. In addition, terms associated with breast cancer had a strong predominance in recent years. The analysis also revealed that the study of socio-environmental factors influencing the development and progression of diseases such as occupational, environmental, and exposure to xenobiotics remained marginal in the cancer research agenda of Argentina during the last four decades.Conclusions: It is concluded that the orientation of the Argentine cancer research agenda excludes, with few exceptions, the prevention and study of socio-environmental factors associated with the development and progression of cancer, favoring a reductionist methodological approach anchored in Molecular and Cellular Biology and linked to the development of therapeutic and pharmacological interventions