Background: Pancreatic cancer is one of the most common malignant neoplasms with an increasing incidence, low rate of early diagnosis, and high degree of malignancy. In recent years, immunotherapy has made remarkable achievements in various cancer types including pancreatic cancer, due to the long-lasting antitumor responses elicited in the human body. Immunotherapy mainly relies on mobilizing the host's natural defense mechanisms to regulate the body state and exert anti-tumor effects. However, no bibliometric research about pancreatic cancer immunotherapy has been reported to date. This study aimed to assess research trends and offer possible new research directions in pancreatic cancer immunotherapy.
Methods: The articles and reviews related to pancreatic cancer immunotherapy were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection. CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and an online platform, and were used to analyze co-authorship, citation, co-citation, and co-occurrence of terms retrieved from the literature highlighting the scientific advances in pancreatic cancer immunotherapy.
Results: We collected 2475 publications and the number of articles was growing year by year. The United States had a strong presence worldwide with the most articles. The most contributing institution was Johns Hopkins University (103 papers). EM Jaffee was the most productive researcher with 43 papers, and L Zheng and RH Vonderheide ranked second and third, with 34 and 29 papers, respectively. All the keywords were grouped into four clusters: "immunotherapy", "clinical treatment study", "tumor immune cell expression", "tumor microenvironment". In the light of promising hotspots, keywords with recent citation bursts can be summarized into four aspects: immune microenvironment, adaptive immunotherapy, immunotherapy combinations, and molecular and gene therapy.
Conclusions: In recent decades, immunotherapy showed great promise for many cancer types, so various immunotherapy approaches have been introduced to treat pancreatic cancer. Understanding the mechanisms of immunosuppressive microenvironment, eliminating immune suppression and blocking immune checkpoints, and combining traditional treatments will be hotspots for future research.
Keywords: CiteSpace; VOSviewer; bibliometric analysis; immunotherapy; pancreatic cancer.