Global Trends in Pancreatic Cancer: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

Scientometrics is a part of science that deals with the analysis of scientific articles and citing them in a selected sample of scientific journals. Scientometrics is at the border between research and the decision-making, policy-making and evaluation processes that underpin research. With the aim of evaluating scientific trends, scientometric approaches provide reliable practical methods through which certain indicators are used to determine the status of any expected goal. The purpose of this research is to review the published studies in the field of pancreatic cancer and evaluate in order to determine the countries, institutes and pioneer researchers in this field. Research materials and methods: In this scientometric study, articles published in the Scopus database until the end of May 2022 were analyzed. Searches were conducted in the Scopus database and among the titles, abstracts and keywords of the articles. For the scientometric analysis of the selected evidence, in the first step, the Biblioshiny add-on app of the R software was used. Also, a visual analysis of scientific mapping was performed on knowledge areas such as main research areas and networks between them. All the analyzes carried out in this project were done by R software and Bibliometrix software package. Results: In the initial search in the Scopus database, more than 170,000 documents were obtained, and due to the large number of data obtained, the data analysis was done in two stages; In one analysis, the top 2000 highly cited articles of this database were used, and in the second analysis, articles published in the last 5 years were evaluated. The results of this study showed that the most relevant sources included Nature and Journal of clinical Oncology. The most authors related to the field of pancreatic cancer included HRUBAN RH and TUVESON DA. Based on the results of the analysis of 2000 highly cited articles on pancreatic cancer, the most relevant affiliations were as follows: UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND and JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL. Also, the results of the study showed that the leading countries in the field of pancreatic cancer are the United States of America, England, Germany, Poland and Italy with the most cited articles. Based on the number of citations, the most cited evidences were related to the articles of BURRIS III HA, 1997, J CLIN ONCOL (with 5136 citations) and CONROY T, 2011, NEW ENGL J MED (with 5074 citations).