Ann Surg Treat Res.  2020 Nov;99(5):305-313. 10.4174/astr.2020.99.5.305.

Chronologic trends of cancer-related lymph node research in PubMed: informetrics analysis

• Oh HJ
• Yang D
• Oh HW
• Jeon JG
• Kim C
• Ahn JY
• Han SW
• Kim CY

• KMID: 2508328
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.4174/astr.2020.99.5.305

Abstract

Purpose
Given the long history of investigation into cancer and its relevance to the lymph node (LN), it would be meaningful to plot the trends of research on cancer-related LN.
Methods
Queries such as “cancer,” “lymph node,” and “cancer and lymph node” were submitted to PubMed to collect articles on cancer and LN published between 1945 and 2017. The collected articles were then extracted by an automatic web crawler and examined through informetrics and linguistic analysis.
Results
The number of articles related to cancer was 2,795,476 and 127,897 articles (4.6%) were found to be relevant to LN. With regard to cancer types, breast cancer was the most studied (37%), followed by gastric cancer (17%). With regard to the subjects in which the surgeon is interested, LN metastasis (57%) was found to be the topic most discussed, followed by LN dissection (22%) and sentinel LN (17%). Publications on LN metastasis gradually increased over time from 1988 to 2017 although those on sentinel LN and LN dissection have stagnated since the early 2000s.
Conclusion
Although research on cancer was abundant, only a small portion was dedicated to investigating its relevance to LN. Western countries had led the research on cancer-related LN, but Asian countries began to participate as major players, expanding their contributions. While LN metastasis, one of the major cancer-related LN topics, showed a steady increase, those involved in oncologic surgery such as LN dissection and sentinel LN did not.

Keyword

Informetrics; Lymph nodes; Neoplasms

Figure

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  Fig. 1 (A) It shows data collection and selection with exclusion criteria for informatics analysis. (B) It is an example showing a method using linguistic analysis.

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  Fig. 2 Diagram and figures show overall trends and quantitative comparisons of lymph node (LN) articles. (A) The proportion of cancer-related LN studies is 4.6% among all cancer-related studies. (B, C) Among the 192,547 LN research articles, cancer-related LN research is 127,897, accounting for 66.4%, and the number has increased recently.

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  Fig. 3 World maps, diagram, and graph show the overall frequency, rate, and trends of the main author's country and continent that carried cancer-related lymph node (LN) articles. (A) Nations' distribution of articles with LN related to cancer. The top 10 nations are the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Italy, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and France. (B) The trend of the top 10 nations' distribution of articles with LN related to cancer (1988–2017). It is confirmed that China has been publishing articles at a rapid pace since 10 years ago. South Korea is also growing. (C) Continental distribution of articles with LN related to cancer. Asia was 37.6% compared to 31.9% in Europe. (D) The trend of continental distribution of articles with LN related to cancer (1988–2017). Trends are increasing in Asia recently. (E) Distribution of the top 40 nations. The volume of publications in each of the 40 countries is compared to the volume published in the last decade. China's remarkable growth is also confirmed. The United States was the most popular with 26,386 articles, followed by Japan with 15,918 articles. Followed by 10,521 in China, 6,003 in Germany, 5,893 in Italy, 4,579 in South Korea, 4,450 in the United Kingdom, 3,216 in Taiwan, 3,036 in the Netherlands, and 2,977 in France.

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  Fig. 4 Diagrams and graphs show the quantitative proportions and trends of published articles by cancer type. (A) Breast cancer was the most studied cancer type. The total was 54,556, accounting for 37%. Followed by gastric cancer at 24,290 (17%) and colorectal cancer 22,251 at 15%. In order, 15,573 (11%) of lung cancer, 10,932 (7%) of prostate cancer, 5,235 (4%) of esophagus cancer, 4,998 (3%) of gynecologic cancer and 3,975 (3%) of pancreatic cancer. (B) It shows trends by cancer type. Breast cancer has been the most abundant since 1980 and has steadily increased to the present, followed by stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, and lung cancer. (C) A graph that standardizes the amount of published journals to normalized frequency. According to this, breast cancer increased steadily to a normalized frequency of 0.38 until 2002, but then slowly increased to 0.39 by 2017. Gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, and lung cancer have slowly increased until now.

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  Fig. 5 Diagrams and graphs show the proportions and trends of quantities by selectively extracting topics that surgeons may be interested in. The topics selected by surgeon's opinion are lymph node (LN) metastasis, sentinel LN, LN dissection, LN count, LN ratio, and LN micrometastasis. (A) The cases of 57% were related to LN metastasis, followed by dissection 22%. The sentinel LN accounts for 17% of the topics, but the LN ratio, count, and micrometastasis did not account for much. (B, C) Comparing the amount of articles with the normalized frequency, the LN metastasis is a subject of constant interest, while the dissection is steady without a large increase. In contrast, the sentinel LN showed a slight decline after mid-2000.

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