Background: Globally lung cancer is one of the most common cancers, and is responsible for almost 20% of all cancer care costs. As a potential treatment for lung cancer, anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy has become a novel scientific hotspot in recent decades. The present study aims at exploring the status and trends of the top frequently cited publications about the anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy for lung cancer via bibliometric analysis.
Methods: The publications concerning anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy for lung cancer were searched on the core collection database of Web of Science, setting the time period for retrieval from 1950 to 2019. The top 100 most frequently cited publications were retrieved, and the bibliometric data were mainly accessed through an open online analysis platform and VOSviewer software.
Results: The cited frequencies about the top 100 cited publications ranged from 218 to 6248. These articles were published in 39 publications, which were mainly ranked in Q1. The top journal in terms of the number of the articles was the New England Journal of Medicine  (16 articles). The most frequently nominated author was Brahmer, JR from Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, while the most contributing institution was Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer. The United States acted as the pioneer in this new field of research and led plentiful of national and international co-operations. Immunotherapy, nivolumab, cell lung-cancer, safety, and docetaxel appeared more frequently as keywords.
Discussions: To sum up, high quality journals, influential authors and institutions and research with high quality evidence were apt to attract more attention and possess more public credibility. Moreover, the bibliometric analysis is yielding up its advantage of identifying and analyzing the characteristics and changes in the intellectual structures of a special topic.
Keywords: anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy, bibliometrics, lung cancer, VOSviewer