Research trends and public interests of immune checkpoint blockade in melanoma: a visualization and bibliometric analysis (Preprint)

Abstract

Melanoma is one of the most life-threatening skin cancers and immune checkpoint blockers (ICB) are widely used in the treatment of melanoma because of their remarkable efficacy.

This study aimed to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of ICB in melanoma for the past decades, while exploring the research trends and public interests of immune checkpoint blockade in melanoma.

We summarized the articles embodied in web of science core collection about immune checkpoint blockers in melanoma each year from 1950 to 2020. R package Bibliometrix was used to data extraction and the visualization of the distribution of publication years and top 10 core authors. The keywords citation burst analysis and co-citation network are performed by CiteSpace. Gunn map online world map was used to evaluate the distribution of countries and regions. Ranking was performed using the Standard Competition Ranking method. Except for these, the results of co-authorship analysis, co-occurrence are analyzed and visualized by VOSviewer.

After removing duplication, totally 9169 documents were included. Distribution of annual publications shows that the number of publications rose sharply from 2015 onwards, to a peak in 2020 or is yet to come. Spatial distribution indicated that there is a large gap between the amount of document published in other countries and the United States. The co-authorship analysis results clustered all 149 top published institution into 8 clusters, each approximately indicated one country, suggested that the international cooperation among various institutions should be strengthened, while the core author extraction indicate the publication peak change of authors. Keyword analysis unraveled the keywords clustering and top citation burst. Co-citation analysis of references analysis the reference from 2010 to 2020, unravel the citation number and centrality of top article.

This study revealed the trends in research interest and public interest of immune checkpoint blockade in melanoma, which may pave the way for further research.