Bibliometric analysis of scientific publications of surgical procedures for papillary thyroid cancer

Abstract

Abstract Background Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is the most common pathological strain of thyroid cancer, and thyroidectomy is the most traditional and currently dominant treatment for PTC. However, the large number of publications on surgical procedures for PTC is not well summarized. This study aims to condense information from scientific papers on surgical procedures for PTC published over the past three decades, quantify the research progress in this field, respond to research hotspots, and reveal potential future research directions. Methods The scientific publications assessed in this study were retrieved from the Science Citation Index—Expanded (SCI-E) database, having been published between 1990–2021. Annual outputs, high-yield journals, countries, institutions, authors, and their citation times were summarized. In addition, bibliometric analysis was performed on keyword co-occurrence, burst citations, and citation networks. The relationships between citations were computed and visualized using the CiteSpace_5.7.R5W and VOSviewer_1.6.16 visualization software programs. Results A total of 442 articles on "surgical procedures for PTC" were indexed in SCI-E during the past 30 years, covering five categories, namely, endocrinology and metabolism; surgery; oncology; otorhinolaryngology; and radiology, nuclear medicine, and medical imaging. The United States, Italy, and South Korea showed dominance in terms of publication output, h-index, and total citations. Thyroid was the top publisher of relevant papers, and the most-cited article was “2015 American Thyroid Association Management Guidelines for Adult Patients with Thyroid Nodules and Differentiated Thyroid Cancer.” The keywords that appeared most frequently were “cancer”, “carcinoma”, “management”, “surgery”, “papillary”, and “nodules”. Popular research topics were "association guidelines,” "extent,” "meta-analysis,” "lymph node metastasis, " and "outcome." In addition, new surgical methods, including intraoperative nerve monitoring and robot-assisted surgery, have been advanced in recent years and may have a good future in the field of PTC surgery. Conclusions This study provides a comprehensive analysis of research in the field of surgical procedures for PTC. How to effectively screen patients for immediate surgery and develop uniform criteria for recommending surgery for patients with progressive lesions may be a focus of research in the coming years.